Leisure
See also: Sport in IcelandThough changing in the past years, Icelanders remain a very healthy nation. Children and teenagers participate in various types of leisure activities. Popular sports today are mainly soccer, athletics, handball and basketball. Sports such as golf, tennis, swimming, chess and horseback riding on an Icelandic horse are also popular.
Chess is a popular type of recreation favored by the Icelanders Viking ancestors. The country's chess clubs have created many chess grandmasters including Friðrik Ólafsson, Jóhann Hjartarson, Margeir Pétursson, and Jón Loftur Árnason. Glíma is a form of wrestling that is still played in Iceland, thought to have originated with the Vikings. Swimming and horseback riding are popular as well as leisure activities without competition. Golf is especially common; around 1 in 8 Icelanders play the sport. Handball is often referred to as a national sport, Iceland's team is one of the top ranked teams in the world, and Icelandic women are surprisingly good at soccer compared to the size of the country, the national team ranked the 18th best by FIFA.
Ice climbing and rock climbing are favorites among many Icelanders, for example to climb the top of the 4,167-foot (1,270 metre) Þumall peak in Skaftafell National Park is a challenge for many adventurous climbers, but mountain climbing is considered to be more suitable for the general public and is a very common type of leisure activity. Hvítá, among many other of the Icelandic glacial rivers, attracts kayakers and river rafterers worldwide.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Iceland
Famous quotes containing the word leisure:
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Some are “industrious,” and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,—work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)