Let me share a few details of a recent wire report concerning the Woman-Carrying World Championship before we discuss the relative merits and drawbacks of the sport.
Reuters reports that in the remote village of Sonkajarvi, "Finnish laborer Jouni Jussila, his tiny wife Tiina clinging to his shoulders, romped through a grueling obstacle course to become the first world champion in woman-carrying."
The World Championship of Woman-Carrying is something like the World Series of baseball. Despite the global nature of its title, the World Series actually involves only American baseball teams and a few kinda-American teams that hang out in Canada. Similarly, the World Championship of Woman-Carrying chiefly involves people from Finland with a few teams from Sweden. Of course, the Swedes have not been lugging their women around on their backs as long as the Finns have, so they had no real hope of winning the world championship.
Basically, the sport of woman-carrying involves hobbling around a 260-yard course littered with timber hurdles and waist-high water. Jouni managed to zip around the course, toting his bride, in 1 minute, 6.2 seconds.
Obviously, this doesn't put him in the same international speed category as today's top sprinters, like Michael Johnson or Namibia's Frankie Fredericks. But it means Jouni probably could whip the likes of Carl Lewis, especially if Carl had to haul Jackie Joyner Kersey on his back for 200 meters.
There are few rules to the sport of woman-carrying. The main rule is that the woman has to be at least 17 years old. This makes sense because the female participant should be mature enough to understand all of the social implications of being lugged around on some guy's back while thousands of drunken Finns look on. In fact, in some parts of the world if a man conveys a less-than-17-year-old female on his back it's considered a felony.
OF course, the main reason for the age limit is that if men were allowed to haul any aged female around the course, the sport would quickly degenerate into a farce where babies would become the chief transportable commodity. The weight of the transportee, you see, is a key element to this sport.
For winning the World Championship, the Jussilas received a mobile phone (perfect for that family on the move), $250, a loaf of rye bread and 79 pints of beer - the equivalent of Tiina's weight. (While the beer equation might be considered a nifty idea in small, obscure European countries with only a vague understanding of feminist issues, I wouldn't suggest you guys rush out and ask your wives how many pints of beer they weigh. Don't go there, bruddah.)
The wire reports said nothing of any product endorsements for the winners. I don't see Nike jumping into this sport. "Just Lug Her" isn't a real advertising grabber.
Which brings us to the social ramifications of this sport. Sure, on the surface, it seems just another enterprise that degrades women. But to be fair, the sport is based on athletic ability and has no "swimsuit" aspect to the competition, as do our local "scholarship pageants."
Sports involving men carrying women aren't exactly unknown. In pairs ice skating, the man not only drags the unfortunate woman around the ice, he often flings her into the air, all while she is clad in barely enough fabric to cover a melon.
And it's hard to dump on this sport when you consider that Hawaii has been promoting a water-logged version of it for decades. We call it tandem surfing.
