Rings Rodge: An American's Guide to Olympic Handball

There is a perfect sport that we don't play in America, and the 2024 Paris Olympics represent a showdown between two retiring GOATs. Lock in!

This is part 2 of RINGS RODGE, a roughly 15-part series where Olympics obsessive and journalist Rodger Sherman breaks down a different sport every day heading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. You can probably get serious previews of the most popular sports on other sites… here, we’re doing unserious previews of sports that aren’t regularly on TV in between the four years between Olympics. Rodger didn’t really time things right so he’s not going to be able to get to all the sports BUT HE’S GOING TO TRY HIS BEST TO DO AS MANY AS POSSIBLE.

Today: HANDBALL!!!

Why should I care about Olympic handball?

Handball is easily my favorite Olympic sport. When I covered the 2016 games, I’d just go sit in the handball arena when I wasn’t working and marvel.

Think about soccer and hockey—easy concept, put the ball into the net. However, kicking a ball is difficult. So is skating on ice and manipulating a puck with a 5-foot long stick.

You know what’s a lot easier? Using your damn hands. We have thumbs for a reason, and contrary to what evolutionary biologists say, it’s not because it helped us make tools or write. It’s so that we can jump into the air and huck a freakin’ handball into the back of the net as hard as possible. BEHOLD.

But in between ripping Shohei Ohtani fastballs into the top corner of the net, handballers sometimes go And-1 Mixtape with it.

In handball there are no hours of frustration between goals—just dunk after dunk after dunk. Europeans claim that Americans are too unsophisticated to handle long periods of scoreless play, and meanwhile they invented Cocaine: The Sport and we can’t get it to catch on over here.

This is what the Olympics are all about: Watching a sport you don’t pay attention to, realizing it’s perfect in every way, and then spending the next four years wondering why you can’t watch the perfect sport every day.

So who’s good?

Conveniently, France. They swept the golds in Tokyo; the women won the most recent World Championships in 2023 and the men won the most recent European championships in 2024. They’re favored in both the men’s and women’s tournaments in Paris.

Are there any GOATs in these Olympics?

The Paris games serve as a perfect final showdown between the two most decorated handballers of all time: France’s Nikola Karabatic and Denmark’s Mikkel Hansen, both of whom have announced they’re retiring after the Paris games. They’ve each won IHF Player of the Year a record three times. Hansen, with his trademark headband, is the all-time leading goalscorer in the history of the World Championships and the Olympics, while Karabatic is the all-time leading goalscorer at the European championships.

I’m Team Hansen, because he looks more like Thor than Thor in the Thor movies, and he loves to drop his handball hammer:

But just about every major tournament of the last decade or so has come down to these two. They’ve faced off in the last two Olympic finals (Denmark beat France in 2016, France beat Denmark in 2020) and the last World Championship final (Denmark beat France in 2023) and the last European championship final (France beat Denmark in extra time in January.)

But when they weren’t playing against each other, they were teammates on Paris-Saint Germain from 2015 to 2022. (Yes, they have a handball team too—why not, the whole handball roster costs about as much as the fourth-highest paid player on the soccer team.)

So there’s no better place for a decisive final showdown between these two than Paris, in the Olympics. Pick a side!

Are there any GOATs not in the Olympics?

Easy: Gauthier Mvumbi (aka GOAT-hier), the 250-pounder from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who went viral in 2021 for scoring goals with his soaring leaps and surprisingly nimble feet. He’s a dead-eye scorer and it’s almost impossible to stop him from getting the ball… although he did seem to get winded rather quickly.

I kinda think I was the first person to tweet about Mvumbi and watching him become an international sensation is one of the great joys of my career… but unfortunately, DRC needed to win the recent African Handball Championships to qualify for Paris, but finished in sixth place.

What about, you know… handball?

The biggest obstacle to American handball dominance, in my opinion, is not the presence of basketball, football, baseball, and a million other sports seizing public spotlight and talented athletes—but the presence of another sport named “handball,” the one where you hit a rubber ball with your hand against a wall. “Handball” is also the name of a thing you’re not supposed to do in soccer, and a thing you are supposed to do in Aussie Rules football but those are less confusing.

As a New Yorker I always assumed ball-wall Handball was a universally prominent sport, but it turns out most places in America do not have random walls scattered through their parks with lines of perpetually sweaty guys waiting their turn to smack away. The most prominent tournament to date remains the Impromptu Bronx Handball Championship of the Bronx, featured on a 2019 episode of Desus and Mero. (Gone too soon!)

However, there are actually more legitimate handball championships. I’m devastated to realize I just missed the 2024 national championships in Coney Island.

And we are not alone in the handball-playing world. Versions of it exist in Spain and Australia and Ireland and presumably elsewhere—”hitting a ball against a wall” is not exactly a tough sport to invent. Ireland seems like the hub: American handball championships are regularly dominated by people named “Clonagh” and “Killian,” and this year’s World Wallball Championships are in Limerick, Ireland. I think they’re onto something with “Wallball,” which seems like the best move to avoid the “handball” dilemma.

Unfortunately, confusion reigns here in the states. The people of assembling a handball team for the Olympics must call themselves “USA Team Handball” to differentiate themselves from the US Handball Association, which organizes championships in the ball-against-wall sport.

Is Team USA going to medal?

No—in fact, this is the only Olympic sport in which Team USA won’t be participating in Paris. (Hey, we got into 31 out of 32—not bad!)

America hasn’t qualified for the Olympics since the Atlanta games in 1996, when they auto-qualified. It is the ultimate “Team USA should win the gold medal in this” sport. We don’t need LeBron! Our nation has hundreds of mobile backup quarterbacks with questionable accuracy and hundreds of third basemen who can nab the runner at first base but hit .178. Let’s get them in the gym and make magic!

In 2021, I did a podcast episode about the future and the challenges of Team USA handball with USATH CEO Ryan Johnson. They’re gearing up to be competitive in 2028, when they’ll be auto-qualified again for the LA Olympics. As preparation, the IHF gave our men’s and women’s teams wild card bids into all the World Championships between now and 2028. The men’s team looked decent at the most recent Worlds, beating Morocco and Belgium. The women’s team needs some work, having lost every game at last year’s North American championships, which were won by Greenland. I remain steadfast in my belief that we should be able to beat Greenland in most sports.

I’m so passionate about this that I feel the need to take things into my own hands. I need you to meet me at the gym with five of your friends. We’re kicking out everybody playing basketball and handballing until we win Olympic gold… Or at least until we attract the attention of better athletes who decide to play and help America win Olympic gold.