Naturally, Sweden won the championship. But there was one embarrassment: this victory turned out not to interest anyone at all, including the tournament hosts themselves. Only two of the twelve matches that took place during the tournament, the attendance exceeded the thousand people mark. Even the final – the World Cup final! – in which the host team played with no less hockey neighbors the Finns, attracted the attention of all – attention! – 1946 spectators.
But the real anti-record for such events in terms of the number of spectators was recorded in the match of the same Finland with Kazakhstan. This game only brought together 25 (twenty-five!) people. That is, not even all of the family members of the team members were present.
I will be told that bandy is “an unpopular sport”. Well, how to say: at the last championship, in 2019, in the same Swedish Vänersborg, the stands were full, and at the Russia-Sweden final the box office was almost full. By the way, this final Russia won.
And do you know why it was like that then, and now it is like that? Because the world’s bandy, aka bandy, aka “Russian hockey” competition is just Sweden and Russia. And this is not even an analogue of the classic confrontation between Russians and Canadians in ice hockey, there are other very interesting teams, very successfully intervening from time to time in this classic dispute.
No, in bandy, Russia and Sweden are still generally out of competition. And if the Russians or the Swedes don’t come to the tournament, then who’s there to watch?
Now let’s talk about what follows. They told the unreasonable that Russia is too big a country to be isolated. Go broke on a duct tape, they were told. They are now convinced of the correctness of this maxim on their own bumps in politics, economics and even culture. So it’s gradually about sports: not just for the return of our athletes, not yet on our terms, so the head of the Olympic Committee Thomas Bach is busy – that’s not what we need in the first place. They need it.
Well, with the world championship of “Russian hockey”, history, although indicative, remains symbolic for the sports world. Indeed, bandy is not football. Although, for example, at the Cross-Country World Cup, the audience was already tired of watching the struggle of Norwegian asthmatics among themselves. Broadcast rankings for this tournament are not to be shown to advertisers. The little that still remains. Yes, and these, it seems, are kept only out of selfless love for skiing.
