Bandy Central

This is a site dedicated to the sport of bandy. Don't know what bandy is? Click here.

I have a humble mission for this site. It is as follows:

1. To keep bandy fans informed of developments in the sport.
2. To vent my personal, biased opinions about those developments.
3. To spread the glories of bandy to as many people as possible, with an eye towards. . .
4. Getting bandy made an Olympic sport for the 2014 Winter Olympics, to be held in Sochi, Russia.

So, here's a little bit about myself and how I became involved in this unique sport.

As a college student in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, my friend Sasha introduced me to our local team, Sibskana. With 20,000 screaming fans braving temperatures that frequently dipped below -20F, watching a game at Irkutsk's Trud Stadium is a unique sporting experience, one that will stay with me for the rest of my life. After finishing my college degree, I moved back to Irkutsk to teach English, which was really just a pretext to watch more bandy.

When the bandy season ended, I decided it was best to try and broaden my horizons work-wise, so I made the ill-advised decision to move to Moscow. I eventually landed a job working as a sports reporter for the state-owned television sports network, RTR-Sport. There I produced and translated reports for another state-owned network, the Kremlin's English-language cable news mouthpiece known as Russia Today. Occasionally, I got to cover bandy, as Moscow and its surroundings boast two teams (Zorky Krasnogorsk and Dynamo Moscow), but mostly I covered soccer, ice hockey, basketball, and men's volleyball.

I have since left Russia and returned to the US, where, outside of Minnesota, there is no bandy to be found. So I have to rely on the Internet for news about my beloved Sibskana (since renamed Baikal-Energia), and on occasion, I can listen to gamecasts online. I try to get back to Irkutsk to see a game at least once a year, but the back-to-back overnight flights (New York-Moscow, Moscow-Irkutsk) make it a considerable haul. But it is always worth it.

A few notes about this site: Many of the links on this page are in Russian, simply because I follow the Russian bandy league more closely than other leagues, and I speak Russian. There are also many links in Swedish and Finnish; I don't speak either of those languages, but many bandy fans do.

Although the purpose of this site is to report on bandy, I am also an avid ice hockey fan, so I will often post on hockey-related topics. Hockey fans are encouraged to visit this site, and everyone is encouraged to post comments or email me with any questions, comments or suggestions you might have.

Finally, the picture above is of the group of guys I go to every game in Irkutsk with. We always sit in Section 9, we always drink honey-pepper vodka, and we always eat salo - Ukrainian salted pork fat.

So, enjoy, and . . .

Байкал - это сила и дружба и честь,
Энергия - это победа!