Bandy is a team winter sport played on ice, in which skaters use sticks to direct a ball into the opposing team’s goal. 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 recognized 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. Based on the number of participating athletes, bandy is the world’s second-most participated winter sport after ice hockey.
Bandy is also ranked as the number two winter sport in terms of tickets sold per day of competitions at the sport’s world championship. However, compared with the seven Winter Olympic sports, bandy’s popularity among other winter sports across the globe is considered by the International Olympic Committee to have a, “gap between popularity and participation and global audiences”, which is a roadblock to future Olympic inclusion.
