Georgia’s recent soccer victory over Greece in overtime penalties, played to roaring crowds at home, is all the main news this week. First time ever accession to the UEFA championships, which will be in Germany this summer!
The country’s rise in a few different sports since I arrived here 25 years ago has been amazing to see. The Olympics in Athens, 2004… I lugged a huge old TV of mine up to my blood brother’s house in Etseri, Svaneti, for the event. It had no remote; you had to exit your couch and turn the dial. Imagine! The thing kept changing channels without any intervention, which suggested a poltergeist, but on my asking, I was greeted with hearty laughter. “One villager has a couple of satellite dishes,” Nodar told me, “and we’re all connected to him. Whatever he watches, we all watch…” Eventually the neighbor bestowed the all-important remote control to another house, because he was sick of local ladies calling him during the day and demanding he change the channel to their soap opera!
But I digress. Georgia won gold in Graeco-Roman Wrestling in Athens. That’s the main point. And now the satellite dishes are everywhere, so no need for such supernatural-seeming connections.
Since 2004, we’ve done equally well in weight-lifting and martial arts (men and women both), as well as hosting world-class winter sports events in Bakuriani and Tetnuldi. Most Svan children are put on skis as soon as they can walk, like Canadian ones on skates. I have a couple of sets of photos of this initiation in our village, memories for a family to cherish. Mestia has two ski resorts nearby, and several villages also have training ski-lift lines. I never learned to downhill ski in Canada (too expensive there), just a bit of cross-country, which is entirely different.
But our biggest sport has become rugby, with quite a few European Championship wins over the last number of years. Something about the typical Georgian male body type and mindset, as well as stellar training, is enabling Georgia to rise in this game as well as all the others I’ve mentioned. A strong history of military victories can’t hurt either, alongside the defeats instilling an idea of battle which runs deep. Even the word for “hello”, gamarjoba(t), means victory.
A few nights ago, TV-less now, I waited online for news from expat friends who were watching the Georgia-Greece event. 0-0… overtime… then the penalty kick-off. The roars beginning all around our apartment block, followed by fireworks and the shooting of firearms, said it all. We were going to the championship this summer. We had beaten a larger country. Our joy was complete.
The competition will be fierce, and I have no idea what our chances are. Ukraine is in the running too, which is also delightful. But simply to have got this far speaks volumes of how Georgia is getting back on its feet on the world scene in sports.
I have a friend from our village in Svaneti who has brought his son all the way to Tbilisi to follow the young man’s dream of advancing in soccer, while still in grade school. I can only imagine what a stimulus the recent victory in this sport has done for him. The whole country is in celebration, and well-deserved too. UEFA 2024 here we come!
BLOG by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
