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Icelandic handball team celebrates silver at the Olympics

Icelandic handball has never enjoyed such a high profile in the US press, and deservedly so. Having just won the silver in the men’s Olympic final, Iceland is one of the smallest nations to win any kind of Olympic medal. American and European journalists and bloggers, seemingly never tired with playing up Iceland’s Viking image, appear to have hit the nail on the head this time. Perhaps it is their Viking genes! Going for gold and getting the silver was a plundering raid of a kind—in Viking terms a highly successful one. While the nation woke at dawn to watch the handball team (always affectionately referred to as ‘our boys’), Iceland’s president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, and his wife, Dorrit Moussaieff, have been at the Beijing Olympics since the start, cheering the team on to victory.

Aside from her official capacity as Iceland’s first lady, Dorrit Moussaieff, who recently visited deCODE Genetics to submit a deCODEme sample of her DNA, is not shy about demonstrating that she is one of the Icelandic handball team’s staunchest supporters. Since she arrived in Beijing for the opening ceremony, she has taken on various roles, from waving the Icelandic flag to assisting the team’s physiotherapist. After the Icelanders beat the Spaniards, her husband said this was the finest hour in the history of Icelandic sport and his wife went one further, insisting that Iceland was not a small country, but one of the ‘biggest in the world’—a phrase that melted the nation’s heart.

No one really expected Iceland to get this far in the competition, except perhaps the Icelanders themselves. Like their forefathers, the Vikings, they struck quickly and relied on a relentless attack while the French were more stoic and concentrated first on bolstering their defenses. In the end, the result was fair and the French deserved to win, but the Icelanders were far from deflated. Indeed, they roared and shouted on the podium as if they had won—and with good cause. In the per capita world at what the Belfast Telegraph has dubbed ‘the alternative Olympics’, a silver medal for a nation of less than 300,000 puts Iceland ahead of Bahrain and Trinidad and Tobago and only one place behind the winners Jamaica at the end of 2008 games.

Link: The New York Times – In Handball, Iceland Will Try For Its First Olympic Title
Link: USA Today – Iceland eyes gold medal in handball
Link: Washington Post – A Morning Jolt of Icelandic Team Handball
Link: Washington Post – Scenes From Iceland’s Handball Triumph
Link: Washington Post – Icelandic Handball’s Finest Moment
Link: Washington Post – Icelandic Handball: Magic Elves, Cured Shark and Existentialism