Two young men sat in the stands at the Sports Pavilion. They wore togas loosely around their bodies, olive wreaths atop their heads.
They spoke no English but seemed to understand at least one word.
“Handball! Handball!” one said in a brief interview.
His friend sitting next to him nodded his head: “Handball.”
The two Greek men still are learning about the sport. Team handball still is spreading its reach, having developed a faithful following throughout most of Europe.
But in the U.S., the sport exists on the fringe of the fringe, with virtually no following, little understanding and very slow growth.
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If an American were to walk into the arena, the preconceived notion of handball is shattered immediately. There is no wall, no small blue ball. The sport is not racquetball for those who can’t afford rackets.
It’s actually water polo on land. Soccer with no kicking. Basketball with a larger goal.
“It is the most fun sport you will find,” one Ukrainian fan said.
It’s mostly a soccer-basketball hybrid. Played on a court about the size of a basketball court, each team fields seven players, one of whom tends a goal at either end. Players charge down the court, passing a ball about the size of a cantaloupe. Players cannot take more than three steps without dribbling the ball.
Fast-paced and physical, the object is to throw the ball into the opposing goal.
The game is divided into two halves, and most scores reach the mid-20s. The scoresheets are familiar to the ESPN generation: fast breaks (basketball), steals (baseball), two-minute suspensions (hockey) and goals (soccer).
Despite similarities to favorite American sports, team handball never has caught on.
“It’s a sport for Europe and was developed for European society,” said Svein Olsen, a former player for the Norwegian national team who has coached Olympic teams for Norway and now Greece.
The court is blue, with orange semicircles at either end near the goal. High above hang flags from 17 countries. The U.S. flag is not among them.
No American team has qualified for Olympic team handball since 1996, when the Games were in Atlanta. This year only one team from the Western Hemisphere, Brazil, qualified for the Games, making team handball perhaps the most localized sport at these Olympics.
In the U.S., there are only a couple of thousand players. Team handball officials have been making a push to grow an American following, though. The International Handball Federation president, Hassan Moustafa, traveled to Colorado Springs two years ago and met with U.S. Olympic Committee officials about increasing the sport’s profile.
“Team handball is a game the American people can fall in love with,” he said then.
The federation recognizes 800,000 teams and more than 19 million players in the world.
In Denmark, team handball is televised four nights a week. A 14,000-seat arena in Hamburg, Germany, regularly sells out, as does an 18,000-seat arena in Frankfurt.
The sport is working in Greece, and Olsen said it can work in the U.S. too.
“People just need to know about it,” he said. “Once they see it, I know they will like it.”