Russian hockey

Bandy

Swedish bandy players in January 2011
Highest governing body	Federation of International Bandy
Nicknames	Winter football
First played	1813 in Cambridgeshire, England
Characteristics
Contact	Limited
Team members	11 field players
Type	Team sport, winter sport
Equipment	Bandy ball, bandy stick, skates, protective gear
Venue	Ice field, bandy arena
Presence
Olympic	Demonstration 1952

Bandy is a team winter sport played on ice, in which skaters use sticks to direct a ball into the opposing team's goal. Based on the number of participating athletes, bandy is the world's second most popular winter sport after ice hockey. Bandy also is the number two winter sport in tickets sold per day of competitions at the sport's world championship compared to the other winter sports.

The sport is considered a form of hockey and has a common background with association football, ice hockey and field hockey. Like football, the game is normally played in halves of 45 minutes each, there are eleven players on each team, and the bandy field is about the same size as a football pitch. It is played on ice like ice hockey, but like field hockey, players use bowed sticks and a small ball.

A variant of bandy, rink bandy, is played to the same rules but on a field the size of an ice hockey rink, with ice hockey goal cages and with six players on each team, or five in USA Rink Bandy League. Traditional eleven-a-side bandy and rink bandy are recognised by the International Olympic Committee. More informal varieties also exist, like seven-a-side bandy with normally sized goal cages but without corner strokes. Those rules were applied at Davos Cup in 2016.

Rink bandy has in turn led to the creation of the sport rinkball. Bandy is also the predecessor of floorball, which was invented when people started playing with plastic bandy-shaped sticks and lightweight balls when running on the floors of indoor gym halls.

The earliest origin of the sport is debated. Though many Russians see their old countrymen as the creators of the sport – reflected by the unofficial title for bandy, "Russian hockey" (русский хоккей) – Russia, England and Holland each had sports or pastimes which can be seen as forerunners of the present sport.

English bandy developed as a winter sport in the Fens of East Anglia. Large expanses of ice would form on the flooded meadows or shallow washes in cold winters, and skating has been a tradition. Members of the Bury Fen Bandy Club published rules of the game in 1882, and introduced it into other countries. The first international match took place in 1891 between Bury Fen and the then Haarlemsche Hockey & Bandy Club from the Netherlands (a club which after a couple of club fusions now is named HC Bloemendaal). The same year, the National Bandy Association was started in England.