In recent years there has been an increase in mixed sports competitions, in which males and females compete together. It mostly happens in relay races, in which the International Olympic Committee is showing more and more interest, but in which in fact the males compete with the males and the females with the females. But there are also cases where boys and girls actually compete together: for example in sailing, swimming, figure skating or mixed doubles in tennis.
On the other hand, it is very rare that males and females compete together in a team sport, something that happens almost only in korfball, a Dutch discipline that is more than a century old, specially designed for mixed teams and recently presented dal New York Times as “one of the least known sports in the world, but also among the most progressive”.
Korfball was invented in 1902 by Nico Broekhuysen, an Amsterdam teacher looking for a team game in which male and female pupils could compete together. Broekhuysen took inspiration partly from netball, a variation of basketball designed to be less physical and less contact than traditional basketball, and partly from a Swedish game with a large hoop placed on top of a ten-foot post, also designed for boys and girls to play together.
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For korfball (from “korf”, which means “basket” in Dutch) Broekhuysen first of all replaced the large ring with something more similar to a basket (which made it easier to understand when scoring) and more generally elaborated a simplified version of the games that inspired him, so as to make his sport suitable for children as well.
In the Netherlands and Belgium, korfball was immediately popular: it was a demonstration sport, with only two Dutch teams participating, at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, and eight years later it was revived, again with mixed teams and again as a sport demonstrative and unofficial, including at the Amsterdam Games.
It is estimated that korfball, of which there are about seventy national federations, is practiced worldwide by around one million people, most of them between Belgium and the Netherlands, where some athletes even earn over three thousand euros a month.
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It can be practiced both indoors and outdoors (there is also a beach version) and in its standard form it is played on rectangular fields 40 meters long and 20 meters wide. It is played eight against eight, with four female players and four players for team, and the goal is to throw the ball into the two baskets, which stand on top of a pole, without a backboard and at a height of three and a half meters (almost half a meter higher than in basketball). In contemporary korfball the baskets are plastic cylinders. The ball is similar to a soccer or volleyball ball rather than a basketball.
Points in korfball are called goals and there is no three-point shot, let alone two-pointers: each goal is always worth one point. Another difference compared to basketball is that the baskets are not at the end of the field but more or less two thirds away: therefore you can also score from behind.
The game includes well-coded moments of attack and defense, you can’t dribble and whoever has the ball can’t take steps or dribble: in short, it’s a sport in which the goal is to get out of the way and then shoot with precision, a sport that — as writes the Italian Korfball Federation, founded in 2003 — assumes “limited physical contact” and requires “wide dexterity and teamwork”.
In the korfball, he wrote the New York Times, it is not always easy to find a balance between male and female players and there are also those who consider it problematic, in terms of gender equality, because the dynamics of the game lead females to mark females and males to mark males. At the same time, however, there are those who believe that in this way sport strikes the right balance. The New York Times it also tells how korfball is evolving: once the males were mainly dedicated to scoring points and the females to making assists, while now the roles are evolving and integrating more and more.
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Like many other minor and niche sports, even korfball has the Olympics as its goal: on its side, compared to many other pretenders, it has absolute gender equality. Against him is the fact that he continues to enjoy a large following in the Netherlands, where some matches attract a few thousand spectators, but very few elsewhere.
Since the 1980s it has also been one of the sports of the World Games, a multi-sport and international event of non-Olympic disciplines. Then every four years there are the World Championships, the next edition of which will be in October this year in Taiwan.
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