Handball Debuted at the Olympics as an Outdoor Field Sport in 1936
The Berlin Games version of handball was played on grass by 11 players per side. The sport that exists today is almost unrecognizable from it.
On August 15, 1936, Germany beat Austria 10-3 in the final of the Olympic handball tournament at the Deutsches Stadion in Berlin, in front of a crowd reported at 100,000 — the largest audience ever to watch a handball match. The game was played on a grass field, 90 by 60 metres, with eleven players per side and goals seven metres wide.
That format, field handball, never returned to the Olympics. The indoor seven-a-side version — faster, played in a basketball-sized arena, with a smaller goal and a ball roughly the size of a volleyball — had been growing across Scandinavia and central Europe since the 1910s. The International Handball Federation recognized it as the dominant form in 1954.
When handball reappeared at the 1972 Munich Olympics, it was the indoor game. The outdoor version had been played in its final major international competition in 1966 and then effectively retired as a competitive discipline. Only Denmark, where field handball had a particularly deep club base, kept the game alive recreationally for decades after.
The six nations at the 1936 tournament — Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, and the United States — remain the only countries to have competed in Olympic field handball. Germany's gold from Berlin is the only medal ever awarded for the sport.
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