Hornussen: The 300km/h Swiss Sport Almost Nobody Has Heard Of
- Shane Riddle
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 11 hours ago
On a late-summer morning in the Bernese countryside, a cannon fires and the games begin. Across acres of mown farmland, dozens of pitches are laid out side by side, and on each one a player is winding up with a whip nearly three metres long. He swings, and a small puck leaps off a metal ramp with a high, furious buzz with the sound that gives the game its name before rocketing away over the field. A hundred metres downrange, a line of men stare into the sky, judge the flight, then fling what looks like giant wooden spades upward to swat the thing out of the air before it lands.
It sounds invented. It is gloriously real, and in German-speaking Switzerland it isn't a novelty but a national sport with four centuries behind it. They call it Hornussen (say it: HOR-noo-sen), after the Hornuss, or hornet, because that is exactly what the flying puck sounds like.
Hornussen sits alongside Swiss wrestling and stone-throwing as one of the country's three traditional national sports, yet almost no one outside Switzerland has heard of it. It is fiercely local, gloriously odd, and improbably for a farmers' game older than modern Switzerland.
Hornussen at a glance
What it is: Two teams; one whips a 78g puck (the Nouss) off a ramp and down a long field, the other tries to swat it out of the air with large wooden boards.
Origin: Rural German-speaking Switzerland; first written record 1625, first known competitive match 1655.
Home: The Emmental and the cantons of Bern, Solothurn and Aargau.
Status: One of Switzerland's three national sports, with Schwingen (wrestling) and Steinstossen (stone-throwing).
Speed: The Nouss flies up to around 300 km/h (measured at ETH Zurich), climbing as high as 70 metres over a flight of up to 300 metres.
Scoring: Strikers earn points for distance; the defending team takes a penalty point for every Nouss that lands untouched — fewest penalties wins.
Governing body: Eidgenössischer Hornusserverband (EHV), founded 1902; around 7,400 players in some 270 clubs.
Sources: Wikipedia; Switzerland Tourism; The Local / AFP.
The buzz that names the game
Everything in Hornussen has its own word, and half the pleasure is learning them. The puck is the Nouss: a 78-gram disc, once carved from wood or horn, now moulded from plastic. It sits on an angled steel ramp called the Bock. The striker swings a long, springy rod, the Stecken — these days carbon fibre, up to three metres — tipped with a hardwood block that does the actual hitting. Downfield lies the Ries, a long trapezoidal stretch the other team must defend, and the boards they fling skyward to intercept the Nouss are Schindel.
When a strike connects, the Nouss screams off the ramp with the buzzing whine that gave the sport its name. Measurements at ETH Zurich clocked it at up to roughly 300 km/h, climbing as high as 70 metres before falling somewhere up to 300 metres away. The defenders' job is to read that flight in a heartbeat and knock the puck down before it touches the Ries.
The scoring has a lovely twist. The striking team racks up points for distance, but the team that wins is the one that fails to intercept fewest — every Nouss that lands untouched is a penalty point against the defenders. In Hornussen, in other words, defence matters more than the spectacular long hit, which is why those wooden boards go up with such desperate urgency.
A game older than modern Switzerland
The origin story is as strange as the sport. One tradition traces Hornussen to an old alpine custom of whacking burning logs down the mountainside to drive off evil spirits. Whatever the truth of that, the written record begins in 1625, when a court in canton Bern fined two men for playing Hornussen on a Sunday and breaking the Sabbath. The first known competitive match came in 1655, in the village of Trub.
For centuries it was a farmers' game, played on harvested fields in late summer once the work was done. Teams from neighbouring villages met to test their strength and, by the old accounts, to settle scores — the matches were known to end in brawls, and the losing side traditionally paid for the refreshments afterwards. Out of that rough rural pastime grew something the Swiss now hold as heritage: today Hornussen stands beside Schwingen and Steinstossen as one of the nation's three traditional national sports.
"For us, it's our Olympics"
Every three years the sport stages a national festival, and it is a sight. At the 40th Swiss Hornussen Festival near Hochstetten in 2024, organisers laid out 32 fields across 60 hectares of farmland, the day's play opening with cannon fire and the winners carrying home a crown of oak leaves, a ceremonial cowbell or a coveted bull's horn. "For us, it's our Olympics," Adrian Tschumi, president of the Eidgenössischer Hornusserverband, told AFP, describing it as much about the family, the surroundings and the party as the sport itself.
It is also genuinely athletic. Top hitters are young, powerful and explosive, and players describe needing real core strength to crack the whip with the speed the Nouss demands. Around 7,400 players keep the game going across some 270 clubs, almost all in the rural cantons of Bern, Solothurn and Aargau, with a growing number of women among them and the Emmental as its spiritual heart.
Tradition meets the smartphone
For something so rooted in the nineteenth century, Hornussen has not stood still. The whippy Stecken are now high-tech carbon fibre, referees log scores live through a smartphone app, and clips of the buzzing Nouss have found a surprising audience on TikTok. The EHV, founded back in 1902, has leaned into the modern tools without letting go of the cannon fire and the bull's horns.
Some of that modernising is about safety. A 78-gram puck travelling at 300 km/h is no toy, and a study at a Swiss trauma centre found that the serious injuries it causes fall mostly on the face and skull of defenders trying to intercept it. Helmets are now mandatory for players born in 1984 or later — a small concession to risk in a sport that otherwise wears its tradition with stubborn pride.
That balance is the whole story of Hornussen: a fiercely local farmers' game, guarded as national identity, quietly adopting carbon and code so it can keep buzzing for another four hundred years. It survives not because the world knows about it, but because the villages that play it would not dream of letting it go — and that, more than the flying pucks, is what makes it worth knowing.