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Try an experiment.
Give an American a basketball, and he’ll shoot it. A football, he’ll spiral it. A baseball, he’ll pitch it. A handball?
Well, the U.S. boasts an unrivaled pool of tough, enthusiastic players: an estimated two million in prisons alone.
And that’s the problem.
In America, handball is a game mostly played by the incarcerated.
Ask an American to play handball, and he’ll grab the nearest small rubber sphere and smash it against a wall.
For the rest of the planet, it’s an entirely different ball game: an Olympic sport since 1972, with some 27 million registered players, in which very large men—and women—throw a volleyball-sized object at a goal with little regard for their personal welfare.
Türkiye is increasingly part of this glorious chaos. The country now has roughly 28,000 licensed handball players, according to the International Handball Federation, up from fewer than 8,000 just a couple of years ago.
Türkiye's women have broken new ground internationally; its men will make their World Championship debut in 2027, and the federation is pushing the game heavily in schools.
The sport is a breeding ground for optimists: former Turkish captain Ramazan Done once conceded, “I can’t play handball until hell freezes over. Time is ticking,” while international Doruk Pehlivan remembers being dragged around practice by his legs to clean the floor: “It was fun.”
But maybe not so much fun for the U.S. at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
As hosts, the Americans must field handball rosters to face powerful professional teams at the 2028 Games. The hiccup? An American who even understands the game is as rare as an icicle in the Mojave Desert.
Sarah Gascon was brought up a short drive from the Long Beach Arena, where the handball battles will take place, and is used to a shrug of confusion at the mention of her beloved sport.
‘‘Ever since I saw the 1984 Games, my life has been consumed by the Olympics.
But when I say handball, people say, you mean baseball?’’ laments the head coach of America’s women’s team. ‘‘I explain that handball is like water polo or soccer on a court.’’
Men’s international Lukas Karlskov knows the feeling.
‘‘Americans reply, ‘oh yeah, my grandfather used to play that sport.’ They have never heard of it.’’
International handball commentator Jeremy Klayman is Scottish, and sort of scared to death.
‘‘A badly mismatched handball game is a long-drawn-out demolition job. Imagine prime Mike Tyson fighting Jake Paul,’’ he warns. ‘‘The Olympics could get ugly.’’
Make no mistake, handball is a brutal, exciting sport, with the ball thrown at speeds up to 140 kilometers an hour—or, since we’re trying to sell this to Americans, 87 miles an hour. Elbows fly, noses break.
But convincing America to fall in love with this very European pastime needs the very best of Hollywood razzmatazz. Cultivating a plucky handballing Rocky Balboa isn’t the problem.
Getting America to care what happens to him is another matter entirely.
The hottest ticket in town right now is the USA men’s basketball team, followed closely by the women, who are luxuriating in a winning streak of 61 games and the reasonable suspicion that losing may be something other countries do.
From basketball it is only a short hop—and, in athletic terms, an extremely high one—to volleyball, where the Americans are also rather good. But this being California, somebody eventually decided that volleyball would be improved by removing the roof, most of the clothing, and any surface that does not get painfully hot in the sun.
Thus, beach volleyball, a sport apparently devised after somebody looked at ordinary volleyball and said, "Excellent. Now let’s make everybody do it in sand.”
Handball looks on jealously. When the U.S. last played the sport at the Olympics, their men and women played 8, losing 7 at Atlanta in 1996. Goals conceded? 232.
Ouch.
"There are a lot of naysayers,’’ Gascon bemoans. ‘‘I have been told we are going to be the worst team in Olympic history.’’
Wherever you look, American handball has obstacles: public awareness, infrastructure, and finance—handballers say they are alone in receiving no funding from the U.S. Olympic Committee.
Yet the stickiest obstacle of all is diglyceryl ether.
For European players, this clingy and permitted hand glue is as vital as sneakers. But ask American gym owners, and it’s no dice: the product is banned in the land of the free.
Removing sticky resin from gym floors costs up to 50 cents a square foot. So cleanup costs for a 40x20 meter handball court rival those of a Dennis Rodman pool party: somewhere in the region of $4,000.
Plans must be laid to avoid total embarrassment in Los Angeles. Help is on the way.
Handball disciples now have a boot camp in Fort Pierce, Florida, a city fittingly named after a 19th-century colonel renowned for fighting lost causes.
Here gather brave men and women who have survived online recruitment campaigns (“no experience required”) and strenuous workout clinics. Muscles are gauged. Throwing speeds dissected. Hand spans measured.
But it’s no secret that homegrown talent is thin on the ground.
Enter Denmark—land of Lego, Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, and an unreasonable number of very good handball players.
Every kid plays—so many, in fact, that Denmark has won five Olympic gold medals, including the men’s title at Paris 2024.
Fortunately for the U.S., Danish handball players have so far escaped Trump’s tariffs, allowing Karlskov to arrive duty-free.
American by birth, Karlskov was born in North Carolina but moved to Copenhagen as a two-year-old, came through Denmark’s world-class training system, represented the country at the youth level, and now plays professionally for leading club HØJ Elite.
Apart from a single family vacation, he had barely been back to America when he contacted its talent-hungry handball chiefs.
“I sent them my video, and two hours later I was in the team.” Batteries included. No instructions needed.
In May, Karlskov took time off from medical school to help the cause. Qualifying as a doctor could wait; the Olympics could not. Jet-lagged and sustained by airport sandwiches, he arrived in rural Iowa and scored twice as the U.S. beat old foes Greenland to qualify for next year’s world championships.
And here American handball gets geopolitically sticky.
Greenland governs most of its own affairs but remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own parliament and government and the right to determine its own future. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has made no secret of his desire to bring the enormous Arctic island under American control.
So consider the scorecard: America is borrowing handball talent from Denmark, beating Greenland at Denmark’s national sport and simultaneously expressing an interest in acquiring Greenland.
This may not be how Copenhagen imagined international handball development. For now, at least, Denmark is still sending American players rather than territory. Given the state of the U.S. game, Washington might be wise to concentrate on one Danish possession at a time.
There are other flickers of hope. On her debut as national coach last year, Gascon guided the women’s team to its first victory in more than five years.
Her message to the players is perhaps the perfect motto for American handball:
“I tell my players they must compete. And that there’s no shame in getting your ass kicked.”
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