The History of Racketlon

The origins of racketlon can be traced back to Finland in the mid Eighties, where four people representing each of the four racket federations got together to form a game they called mailapelit - i.e. "racket games". The first Finnish Championships were held in Helsinki in 1986 and the sport rapidly grew to a size that made it possible to attract almost 400 people to some tournaments. Since then it has been made clear that mailapelit is a sport that will stay around. Finnish championships are still organized on a yearly basis although the venue has been moved from Helsinki to Lahti.
In Sweden racketlon can be traced back to - at least - the end of the 1980:s. That is when (in May 1989) the "Mr Racketlon" of Sweden and twice national champion, Peter Landberg, organized the first competition. The following year, in 1990, the first Swedish Championships took place and attracted considerable interest from start; no less than 218 people participated. Since then, Peter Landberg has organized national championships every year and the sport has become fairly well established. Still, after more than ten years, about half of the participants in the national championships are people that have not taken part before. This is a reflection of the fact that racketlon is a sport that is spreading to an ever wider audience. At least among racket players in the Stockholm area, where all national championships so far have been played, racketlon is no longer an unknown sport.

During these initial years Swedish racketlon has gone through a number of interesting developments. During the first couple of years the name "racketlon" was not yet invented. Instead, "racket championships" (Swedish: racketmästerskap) was used. Also, the rules were different. For some time in the beginning the ambition was to keep the characteristic rules of counting in each of the sports meaning e.g. that the tennis set was played to 6 games, the badminton set to 15 points where only the server can get a point - and so forth. This method of counting, however, required some fairly complicated mathematics involving conversion tables and much scratching of heads. After a tight match, often it was not clear to the players who had actually won until the mathematics had been done. Then, in 1994, the present rules of counting were introduced thanks to an unexpected discovery. It was found out that a similar game, mailapelit, was played in Finland. The Finnish game contained the same sports but the counting was different and much simpler; "each set to 21 points - most points is the winner". These rules were straightforwardly imported and the 1994 Swedish Racketlon Championships were using the Finnish counting, which has been the case ever since.

Another interesting story from the history of racketlon is the idea that Peter Landberg had a few years ago of an alternative, more spectacular, way of deciding the best racket player in the country. The idea was to let a traditional tournament decide the four best racketlon players, and then to invite the top national player in each of the four sports. These eight players would then compete for the title. This was arguably a fantastic idea that had the potential to raise great interest from media, especially since Sweden has a tradition of bringing out racket players of high international standard. Former table tennis World Champion Jan-Ove Waldner, former badminton (doubles) World Champion Thomas Kihlström, former squash European Champion Fredrik Johnsson and former French Open (tennis) finalist Mikael Pernfors were invited - and accepted. Swedish national television were invited and were planning to send two hours of racketlon on prime time. All was set for a major media sports event. Imagine the media value of super stars Waldner and Pernfors fighting it out on the badminton and squash courts. Or, perhaps even more interesting, imagine Waldner in a situation where he needs to win only two points in the final tennis set against top international tennis player Pernfors. Although a huge difference in tennis capabilility both players would be fighting for every point...
Unfortunately, practical matters like injuries and conflicts of interest got in between and the event never happened. Instead, the championships were carried out the ordinary way. But the idea lives on and is probably good enough to turn into reality sooner or later, perhaps on an international level... - but my personal opinion is that I doubt that the stars of the individual sports would have much chance against the top racketlon players of today. While racketlon has matured as a sport the players have had time to train and the best have reached impressively high levels in all four sports. It is no longer as easy as it used to be to acquire a ranking among the Swedish top ten. Magnus Eliasson, Swedish national champion of years 2000 and 2001, to take the best exampel trains, according to one of his closest competitors, 5 hours a day, almost every day of the week (2-3 hours according to his own humble estimate). Magnus Eliasson, by the way, is a special case since his main background as an athlete is not in any of the racket sports but in ice hockey(!) (- which he has played professionaly in the US, Finland and Germany). This emphasizes that the racketlon rules give advantage to the all-round player rather than to the specialist. Unlike several of the other best racketlon players Magnus Eliasson never ranked among the Swedish national elite in any of the individual sports. Although he has moved up the Swedish squash ranking in a speed probably unprecedented for someone over thirty. At present he ranks among the top hundred.