Wife Carrying World Championships
 Sonkajarvi in Finland - July 2007

Amusing Championships

• Wife Carrying World Championships
• Wife Carrying Competitions Around the World
• Other unusual championships in Finland
• The 200 Metres Wedding Dress

Wife Carrying World Championships

Will and Guy have discovered that in July 2007 the Wife Carrying World Championships took place in Sonkajarvi in Finland. Teams from all over the world travel to take part in this annual event.

Apparently the wife doesn't have to be your own since the contest is based on a 19th century tradition when it was not uncommon for men to steal women from neighbouring villages.

The Wife-Carrying event is charged with competitive spirit and is renowned for its warm and humorous atmosphere. The championships have traditionally been dominated by Estonian teams and that doesn't please the local Finns who have been wife-carrying for centuries.

Estonia's Madis Uusorg carries his wife Inga Klausen to win the Wife Carrying World Championships in 61.7seconds

Margo Uusorg [5 times winner and brother of this year's champ]and Egle Soll from Estonia hold the Wife-Carrying World Record with a time of only 1 minute 0.7 seconds. The Wife Carrying World Championship is competed over a 253.5 metre-long official track. The surface of the track is partially sand, partially grass and partially asphalt. The track has two dry obstacles and a water obstacle, about one metre deep.

There are a few basic rules to observe in the Championship, the two most important being that all the participants must have fun and that the winner is the couple who completes the course in the shortest time.

The wife to be carried may be your own, the neighbour's or you may have found her further afield. The minimum weight of the wife to be carried is 49 kilos. If it is less than 49 kilos, the wife will be burdened with such a heavy rucksack that the total weight to be carried is 49 kilos. If a contestant drops his wife, that couple will be fined 15 seconds per drop. The contestants run the race two at a time, so each heat is a contest in itself. Will and Guy have decided to give the championship a miss this year.

Stop Press

This year's champion won a plasma television and his wife's weight in beer.

Wife Carrying Competitions Around the World

It seems that wife carrying competitions have spread from their origins in Finland to become a global phenomenon.  It seems that the wife has to be carried a distance of precisely 253.5 meters or 278 yards in American events.

Hong Kong

The best feature of the Hong Kong wife-carrying championships was that it was held on Valentine's day in 2008.  The winners dressed as Superman and Wonder Woman, were Michael and Cora Fung.

In the Hong Kong event, the course is shorter than the world championship distances.  However, in a novel twist the wife has to bend down and pick up roses.

Other unusual championships in Finland

Mobile phone hurling:
Finland, being the home of Nokia, and thus the promised land of cell-phones, is the obvious place to organise the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships. This year, a record 3,000 spectators watched the competition in Savonlinna, eastern Finland.

The mobile phones used in the competition are provided by the organisers. All phones are original and fitted with batteries. As not everyone wants to be reachable all the time, some competitors have wanted to throw their own phones as far as possible, but that's against the rules.

And the prize for the longest throw? A new mobile phone.

Air Guitar Championships:
Finland does host one peculiar sporting event in which success doesn't depend on brute force or resilience, but on creativity and sociability. For already a decade, the northern Finnish town of Oulu has gathered imaginary guitar heroes to the annual Air Guitar World Championships. In recent years, more than fifteen nationalities have been represented in this light-hearted yet competitive global showcase enjoyed by thousands.

For the unschooled, air guitar is the art of pretending to play along to a rock solo or a chord sequence with nothing but an imaginary guitar and the fitting facial expressions. Most contestants are national champions sent to Oulu by their local air guitar associations.

In the final, they must perform a compulsory one-minute song as well as a song of their own choice. Judges are looking for originality, technique, stage charisma, artistic impression and – obviously – "airness".

The 200 Metres Wedding Dress

A Ken says he originally planned to make the dress 2008 metres long, in tribute to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
'But it would have been too hard to make and to handle. So I changed the length to 200.8, and I hope the long train will bind us together forever,' he said. Ken, of Guangzhou city, China, placed the order with a local factory who took nearly three months to complete the dress, reports the Guangzhou Daily.

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