The History of Racketlon

The History of Racketlon

The origins of Racketlon can be traced back to Scandinavia in the mid '80s, where four people representing each of the four racket Federations got together in Finland to form a game they called Mailapelit - i.e. "Racket Games". The first Finnish Championships were held in Helsinki in 1986 and the sport rapidly grew and slowly changed to the Racketlon format.

In Sweden, Racketlon can be traced back to, at least the end of the '80s. In May 1989 the "Mr Racketlon" of Sweden and twice National Champion, Peter Landberg, organized the first competition. The following year, in 1990, the first Swedish Championships took place and attracted more than 200 players.During the first couple of years, the name "Racketlon" was not yet invented.

Instead, "Racket Championship” was used. Also, the rules were different. For some time in the beginning, the ambition was to keep the characteristic rules of counting in each of the sports. E.g. Tennis set was played to 6 games,the badminton set to 15 points, where only the server can get a point and so forth. This method of
counting, however, required some fairly complicated mathematics involving conversion tables. After a tight match, often it was not clear to the players who had actually won until the mathematics had beendone.

Then, in 1994, the present rules of counting were introduced, thanks to an unexpected discovery.It was found out that a similar game, Mailapelit, was played in Finland. The Finnish game contained the same sports but the counting was different and much simpler - "Each set to 21 points - most points is the winner". These rules were straightforwardly imported and the 1994 Swedish Racketlon Championships
were using the Finnish counting, which has been the case ever since.

As already mentioned, Racketlon also emerged in Finland under the name of Mailapelit(i.e. "Racket Games"). Interestingly, the Swedish and Finnish developments seem to have occurred independently at around the same time. It was only after several years of activity that the movements got to know about each other with the result mentioned above that the Finnish rules were adopted by the Swedes. Various indications show that activities similar to Racketlon are going on in many places of theworld.

In Germany, for example "Schlägerturniere" (Eng. racket tournaments) involving 3, 4 or even 5 rackets seem quite common. (The fifth Schläger being a golf club...) In England there are vague traces of something called Quintathlon covering squash, tennis, rackets, real court tennis and (again!) golf.

A significant step towards the Internationalization of Racketlon was taken in the autumn of 2001 when the first ever International Racketlon tournament took place. Gothenburg Racketlon World Openwas played from the 2nd-4th of November, 2001. This was when the Finnish and Swedish Racketlon elites first faced each other and the result was no less than a shock to the somewhat conceited Swedish
Racketlon community. The Finns won both the Prestigious Men's and Ladies' Elite Classes and a final victory in the Men's Veteran class made it painfully obvious to the Swedes that they had been the victims of a clean sweep and totally unexpected too.

Players from six different countries took part. Apart from Finland and Sweden, Scotland, France,Germany and Bulgaria were represented. Since then, one milestone after another have been reached,The first international Racketlon tournament in Finland was played in May 2002 and in the same year, the first Racketlon tournament outside Scandinavia took place in Scotland in mid August. At the second World
Championships in Gothenburg 2002, a National Team Competition was played for the first time.

The premiere of the World Tour was in 2003.The International Racketlon Federation (IRF) was founded on 15th September 2002. Official languages are French, English and German and the acronym later changed to French FIR - Federation
Internationale de Racketlon. The first FIR COUNCIL was elected in October 2005 at a General Meetingduring English Open in London.