Bright handball days

This article originally appeared in Atlantic Review #4 in 2024.
Written by Uni Holm Johannesen / Photo: Sverri Egholm - portal.fo

The tears of joy visibly springing from her eyes made it plain just how much was at stake.

Bjarta Osberg Johansen wiped both her eyes and her cheeks as she was asked to put her powerful emotions into words on live television.

– I am terribly moved right now, she answered the reporter Tórður Mikkelsen in the pounding handball arena Ásvelli in Hafnafirði, where players and supporters were hugging and throwing their arms around one another.

This was Sunday evening, 7 April 2024. The Faroe Islands had lost narrowly to Iceland, but at the very last moment the combined results fell into place, and for the first time the women of the national team had played their way into a final tournament.

– This is properly big, she said of by far the greatest achievement in the short history of the women's national team.

Bjarta Osberg Johansen, 31, is the oldest player in the national team squad, and she has been part of it for a long time. Including the years when the women's national team did not play internationals regularly. Like several of the others, she has never been paid a penny for the enormous effort she has put into the many hard duels on the handball court. Nor does she get travel money for national team training or compensation for lost earnings. For the same reason she has to buy her own time off from an accommodating employer whenever she is away on national team duty. At the national team camps it is usually parents and other volunteers who cook the meals and wash the kit.

Those are the terms. Even so, as a defender and a line player she has, together with others, carried the load for many years – as the commentator Geir Wardum put it in the television studio immediately after the interview.

Bjarta heard plenty about that television moment once she got back to the Faroe Islands, she says now with a smile.

– The moment just felt so unreal. This has demanded so much of all of us, and it was emotional when it came off. A few years ago there was absolutely nothing to suggest that I would ever get the chance to be part of a final tournament, and this may well be the only time I get that opportunity myself, she says.

Roaring progress
The groundbreaking ticket to the European Championship confirmed once again that these are striving times in Faroese handball. It is only 10 years since continuous national team work for women was taken up again, and already the side is counted among the notable teams in Europe.

This has been achieved even though the financial room for manoeuvre has been extremely limited. Nor, fundamentally, have the structures around the team been particularly stable. Over these years Bjarta has had eight different national team coaches.

– Coaches differ in temperament and usually each want their own thing, and as a player it has been demanding to have to adapt entirely to new circumstances. This time round we have had the same national team coach for a year, and that feels like a long time, she says.

The heavy financial burden and the limited working capacity were the recurring reasons why national team work for women collapsed on several occasions.

It is 24 years since the first qualifying matches. Bjarta was seven years old then. The baptism of fire came against Sweden in Klaksvík in 2000, and it was a harsh one. The Swedish stars were considerably stronger and won convincingly, 34-12. The half-time score was 14-2.

Among the Faroese scorers that day was Gurið Krosslá Augustinussen, then 18 years old, who was also playing her first international. She remembers that the Faroese players had far too much respect for the opposition, because these were star players whom people in the Faroe Islands only ever saw on television.

The Vágur woman was among the best players in the domestic league for the best part of 20 years, yet she won only 13 caps. That was down to the instability of the national team programme. As one example, there was no international at all for four years after the punishing task against Sweden.

In 2004 the women's national team took part in the Challenge Trophy, a handball tournament for small nations. Gurið and the rest came home from Italy with silver medals. The outcome was the same in Bosnia the following year.

In the Faroese media there was talk and writing at the time about handball having been revived, but it still proved heavy going to get the national team programme running smoothly. A few sporadic attempts were made, but it was not until 2015 that anything like a sustainable long-term plan for the women's national team was set in motion.

– The reason for the unstable national team work was undoubtedly a lack of money and of direction, but perhaps also that the players did not know what it took to compete at that level, Gurið believes.

A few years ago the people at the Handball Federation began to say loudly and clearly that both the men's and the women's national teams were going to play their way into a final tournament. At first that was laughed off as talk with no grip on reality, but the narrow path up towards the handball summit was nonetheless taken, step by step.

Gurið acknowledges that the strides made over the past 10 years have been unusually large. The coordinated player development is working well, and youth work around the country is now on a firm footing. Training is more focused, greater emphasis is placed on physical conditioning, the coaching teams are more expert, and interest from sponsors and the media has grown.

– That is why it was both delightful and moving to see how happy they were after the match in Iceland, she says, adding that it is both good and necessary that more of the women have the courage to go to other countries to play.

More are playing abroad
One key difference is that several of the younger players are now on contracts in Denmark, either full-time or part-time. As a result, competition for places in the national team is fiercer than before.

As an unpaid amateur in the Faroe Islands with two small children at home, that places particular demands on her. Even so, Bjarta tries as far as she can to live like a part-time professional. She works as a biologist at the consultancy SMJ. Last year she cut her hours, from 40 to 35 a week, to ease a daily routine that can be long and hard. More often than not she is up at five in the morning making packed lunches. She is at the office by six, so that she can fit in a strength session after work in the afternoon, before the children are collected from nursery. Then in the evening she trains with the other Kyndil women.

– The standard has shot up over the past few years. I often say that watching a match in the top women's league 10 years ago would have been embarrassing. The attitude has changed, and that also means that foreign interest in Faroese players is growing, she says.

Bjarta Osberg Johansen tried her luck abroad for a spell too, while she was in Denmark to study. That was in 2018. She played for Aalborg HK in the third tier and then moved to Vendsyssel in the second. The stay was not a long one. She became pregnant and moved back to the Faroe Islands once she had finished her degree.

Bjarta has had one spell in the top Danish league in another sport altogether. That was as a football goalkeeper.

The footballer chose handball
Bjarta admits herself that as a youngster she was in fact a better footballer than she was a handball player.

In 2009, at the age of 16, she went to a Danish boarding school in Ikast. Bjarta was already among the best goalkeepers in the Faroe Islands, and she had played her first minutes for HB's top women's side. It did not take long for Team Viborg in the top Danish league to notice her talent. They invited her to train with them, and several times a week she drove from Ikast to Viborg together with her team-mate Pernille Harder, who was a year older. Harder was already an international, and would later be regarded as the best footballer in the world.

Also in that changing room was the centre-back Stine Ballisager, who has likewise won many caps for Denmark.

In the spring of 2010 Bjarta got her first minutes in the top Danish football league, but when she finished school in Ikast she moved back to the Faroe Islands. Here she went to the sixth-form college in Hoydalar and started playing for B36.

Bjarta played football in the summer and handball in the winter, but sometimes the two ran together. On one occasion she played a league football match as goalkeeper against KÍ, who had Randi Wardum between the posts. The two of them were also competing for the national team place. Later the same day the pair lined up together in the Kyndil defence in a league handball match.

When Randi retired as a football goalkeeper after the 2014 season, there was no doubt that Bjarta, who had been voted goalkeeper of the year in both 2012 and 2013, would own the national team place from then on. But then she suddenly threw away her football gloves as well.

At that point Bjarta was in both the handball and the football national teams, and had therefore reached the position of having to choose a sport, because it was hardly possible to give herself wholeheartedly to both.

– At Kyndil the women trained with real purpose and, on the whole, put more at stake, and that suited me better. Football did not value its women to the same degree. As entertainment, women's handball has become a good product, but it is still free to watch a women's match in the top football league. To my mind that is the same as saying that this is not something people ought to pay for, and it does nothing for motivation.

Bjarta took the final decision to quit football after a match the women's national team played against a boys' youth national team. She was 21 at the time. In one challenge everything went black: she took a kick to the head and broke two teeth.

– And with that I called it a day, she laughs.

Showing the way
For young Faroese girls it matters a great deal that the Faroese handball women are breaking new ground these days.

That is the view of Eyðvør Klakstein, who holds a master's degree in sports psychology. She has studied why young girls give up sport. One recurring reason is a lack of role models. The link is clear. Good role models mean that more girls want to play and set themselves ambitious goals.

– The men's handball results are a good source of inspiration too, but girls usually choose female role models to see themselves in. As the American psychologist Claire Midgley has put it: She needs to see it to be it.

The make-up of the women's national team is varied. The players come from all over the country and from different backgrounds. Some have families. Some play, work and study in the Faroe Islands. Others are abroad to study, and some are professionals in other countries.

– That means young girls have plenty of role models to choose between. That matters in a society as small as the Faroese one, where hardly every girl could picture herself playing professional handball abroad. What they see now is that a great deal is possible all the same, she says.

In the Faroe Islands the base is not as broad as it is elsewhere. There are fewer players to choose between, and it can be difficult to put together a team of players who all want to be professionals. Grassroots and elite level overlap in many cases, in a national team context too, and that requires the social environment to be a healthy one. The sports federations and the clubs have to strike a difficult balance so that players do not drop out.

– It turns out that girls are quick to turn their backs on sport if they are not thriving. As a society we are often poor at holding up athletes who do well in professional sport, but I think we sometimes forget the others, the ones who do not have sport as their main job and still achieve fantastic results. We also rarely hear about what athletes manage outside their sport. If, as an athlete, you take on a demanding course of study, it can be hard and gruelling to do justice to both wholeheartedly. Girls need to hear those stories too, to keep them at it, she says.

A new summit
Bjarta can feel clearly that interest in the handball women has grown.

– We have noticed that children in particular have started gathering around the women's national team. It happens more than occasionally that they ask whether I am not the one who plays for the national team or for Kyndil, and naturally we are delighted to be noticed, she says.

For several decades it proved, for good reasons, to be hard to tread a different path. This year it is 50 years since the Faroese women's national team was first assembled to play its first unofficial practice matches. They were against Iceland on 3 and 4 November 1974. The Faroe Islands lost the first match 11-7 in Tórshavn and the second 18-7 in Klaksvík.

Over the next 26 years the women's national team played a handful of one-off unofficial matches before they entered qualifying and played their first qualifier against Sweden at the turn of the century.

The matches in November 1980 were notable, when the Greenlandic women's national team came to the Faroe Islands to play. On that occasion the Faroese women played under protest. Before the matches the squad sent a letter of protest to the newly founded Handball Federation, because the preparations were below any acceptable standard. The national team coaches Finnur Helmsdal and Jógvan Martin Mørk were appointed in the same week the matches were to be played, and the players had not trained together at all.

– If the preparations are as poor as this another time, every one of us will refuse to show up on the court, they wrote in the letter.

With Svanna Hanusardóttir as top scorer, the Faroe Islands won the first match 13-12. The second ended in a 9-9 draw.

There had been another remarkable event the year before, when Neistin's women's team took part in a European competition for champion clubs for the first time. That was in January 1979. Ruch Chorzow from Krakow played in front of a packed hall in Tórshavn and won both matches. During the eighties Faroese women's teams also tried their hand in European competitions in the odd year.

At long intervals the national team did manage now and then to reach new heights. The good results in the Challenge Trophy in 2004 and 2005 were one high point. In 2017 the Faroe Islands came through qualifying and earned the right to play among the best in the main qualifying round. And the greatest achievement so far is that the women will shortly set course for Basel in Switzerland to play in the European Championship finals.

There the Faroe Islands will face Denmark, Croatia and the hosts Switzerland in the group stage. Pundits do not give the Faroese side much of a chance, but that will not leave Bjarta and the rest downhearted. These eager women have shown so often that the predictions are wrong, and now a new sporting cairn is to be built.

– We do not intend to rest on what we have achieved. Now we are going to find out whether we can take points in any of the matches, she says.

FACTS
Bjarta Osberg Johansen
Born: 28 April 1993
Has played 35 internationals (as at 1 August 2024)
Has played for Kyndil's first team since 2010, apart from a spell at Aalborg HK and Vendsyssel Håndbold in Denmark
Played her first handball international and her first football international in 2012
Faroese champion in 2014, 2017 and 2024, and cup winner in 2014, 2019, 2022 and 2024
Goalkeeper of the year in football in 2012 and 2013.
Defender of the year in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2024, and line player of the year in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2023 and 2024.

The women started playing
It is held that it was originally Faroese women who took up handball in the Faroe Islands.
In 1928 a young Danish teacher came to the Faroe Islands as a supply teacher for a short spell. She taught the lower-secondary school girls in Tórshavn to play handball. They mostly played in the Realskúli yard and later in the municipal school yard. The boys gradually joined in as well. In 1931 the first handball club, Neistin, was founded.
Handball is Danish in origin. The first set of rules for how the game was to be played was written in 1906, and the first organised match was played the year after.