Sport in Slovakia is influenced by its climate and geography; popular summer sports include soccer, tennis, volleyball, swimming, cycling and hiking, popular winter sports include skiing and snowboarding. The most watched sports in Slovakia are soccer, ice hockey and tennis. The country features a typical post-Eastern Bloc system, where sport is being financed primarily from the state budget. In 2012, the state will pay 30,402,634 euro to over 7,500 different sporting clubs.
Internationally, the most successful sport in Slovakia is ice hockey where currently, as of 2012, the country is ranked as the sixth best team in the world by the IIHF World Ranking.
Read more about Sport In Slovakia: History, Description, Slovak Sports in World Rankings
Famous quotes containing the words sport in and/or sport:
“Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)