Hornussen, the Swiss national sport with a sting

If a plastic puck being fired at you at up to 300km/h isn’t your cup of tea, maybe give the Swiss sport of Hornussen a miss. But if you want to take part in a 400-year-old tradition sometimes known as “farmers’ golf”, strap on a helmet and give it a go! Hornussen is actually one of three Swiss national sports – the others being Schwingen (wrestling) and Steinstossen (stone-throwing) – and it invariably generates stunned reactions from people seeing it for the first time. “Looks like something out of a cartoon”, “This game looks awesome! Why isn’t this an Olympic sport?”, “More exciting than curling” were some of the many comments to a video on Hornussen we made a few years ago: While comparisons are often made between Hornussen and golf, the only real similarity is that a player whacks a stationary object as far as possible. As the Swiss Historical Dictionary explains, various versions of an object-whacking game were popular in central Switzerland, especially in and around Emmental ...