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Fact check: Has Sweden really recognised sex as an official sport?

Articles in international media suggest that Sweden has become the first country in the world to recognise sex as an official sport, with the country supposedly hosting the European Sex Championships in June. How true are these reports?

Published: 7 June 2023 15:42 CEST
Fact check: Has Sweden really recognised sex as an official sport?
Two people in bed. Photo: Isabell Höjman/TT

Is this true? Is sex officially a sport in Sweden?

Sorry to disappoint, but no, the rumours are not true.

Why are people saying it is, then?

Well, the rumours are probably based on the fact that a European Sex Championship was hosted in Sweden (in an undisclosed location near Jönköping, apparently) on June 8th.

“Sweden has formally recognised sex as a sport and will stage its first-ever sex tournament the following week,” reads an article in the Times of India, which the Expressen newspaper then drew attention to in its own report. 

Times of India adds that contestants in the tournament will have “daily sexual encounters that might last up to six hours” in a contest which will supposedly last for six weeks.

Who is behind the so-called championship?

The group behind the championship is the official-sounding Swedish Sex Federation, led by chairman Dragan Bratic, also known as the “strip king” after opening a handful of strip clubs up and down the country.

Bratic described the championship to Expressen as “like the Eurovision Song Contest”, adding that it would consist of up to 20 competitors having sex live on camera, with points awarded by the audience and jury on categories such as seduction, foreplay, penetration and “artistic execution of poses”.

According to the federation’s website, the most highly scoring and “most important” category is for the couple who are deemed to be “most engaged during the competition, as well as most artistic according to the Kama Sutra and most popular with the jury and audience”, where couples can receive from 10-20 points as well as double or triple points if they are deemed to be “extremely good competitors/sportspeople”.

Is the Swedish Sex Federation an official sporting federation?

Despite the Swedish Sex Federation’s official-sounding name, it is not a member of the Swedish Sports Confederation, Riksidrottsförbundet (RI), the umbrella organisation for Swedish sports clubs. It did submit an application for membership late last year, which was rejected.

This essentially means that no, sex is not an official sport in Sweden.

“Rumours are spreading that this group has been elected to the Swedish Sports Confederation, which is wrong, it is entirely false,” RI’s media spokesperson Anna Setzman told The Local.

“Anyone can submit an application and say they have a federation or an organisation and that they want to be a member, and an application was submitted from someone calling themselves the Swedish Sex Federation,” she said.

“That application wasn’t even completely filled out, so it wasn’t even up for discussion. And that’s essentially all we have to say about it.”

What would have happened if the application was complete?

“There are certain criteria, and you have to fulfil those criteria, and they weren’t in the application,” Setzman said. “We didn’t even have to look at the criteria because the application wasn’t complete.”

Setzman wasn’t able to confirm or deny whether sex could be considered a sport in Sweden if the self-titled Swedish Sex Federation’s application had been properly filled out.

“We haven’t looked into it, we never discussed it as the application was rejected for not being complete. That discussion never happened.”

Setzman was also frustrated by the fact that incorrect information about RI has spread so widely internationally when The Local asked about the group’s reaction to the story.

“This has produced a huge amount of unnecessary work for us, answering questions, and it’s unfortunate that all this information is spreading, which then becomes confusing for us and we have to handle it, instead of doing what we’re supposed to be doing.”

Bratic, the chairman of the Swedish Sex Federation and the man behind the championship, received a one-and-a-half-year prison sentence in 2019 for accounting and tax crimes, as well as a three-year ban on running a business, Expressen reports.

He was convicted for not paying VAT or employer contributions to the young women – many of whom were immigrants – who worked at his clubs, as well as not accounting income from his customers.

“This dodgy operator has taken up far too much of our time,” Setzman said.

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SPORT

EXPLAINED: Why is Swedish cricket facing a scandal?

As recently as 2015, cricket was welcomed into the Swedish Sports Confederation (RF) as the fastest growing sport in the country. Now, nine years later, the sport has lost state funding and is risking expulsion from the confederation. What happened?

Published: 4 April 2024 14:16 CEST
EXPLAINED: Why is Swedish cricket facing a scandal?

In May last year, RF withdrew the Swedish Cricket Association’s funding due to problems with the association’s democracy.

One of the chief issues, according to RF, is that the cricket association has regularly held extra yearly meetings, with different factions within Swedish cricket using these as an opportunity to express their lack of confidence in the association’s board, regularly dismissing and reappointing different board members.

“Something was not right,” Björn Eriksson, RF chairman between 2015 and 2023, told SVT in its new mini documentary on Swedish cricket.

So, what happened?

In April 2019, the association held an annual general meeting (AGM), where the current chairman, Tariq Suwak, was elected. A few months later in December, this board was dismissed at an extraordinary general meeting.

Between 2021 and 2022, two AGMs and four extraordinary general meetings were held, with some members of the board replaced in 2021 and again in 2022, where Suwak was again appointed chairman.

In spring last year, RF withdrew state funding after an external investigation by Ernst and Young determined that the association’s leadership lacked the ability to lead, was incapable of carrying out long-term structural work to improve the association, lacked transparency and did not have the same level of democracy as other sport associations in Sweden.

“We believe that the association’s management and much of the rest of its activities are permeated by a poor understanding of how associational democracy should work,” the report stated. “Amendments to the statutes and extraordinary annual general meetings are used as a weapon to counteract people with dissenting views.”

“What they say in the report, it’s the truth,” cricket association chairman Tariq Suwak told SVT. “It’s a fair description of Swedish cricket”.

The report also stated that there was a lack of dialogue between association members and its board, which Suwak agrees with.

“I’ve felt the same way, as have many others… that there’s a lack of dialogue with the board. An extraordinary general meeting has felt like the only forum for asking questions and communicating with those who make the decisions,” he told SVT.

In a statement on its website, RF explained its decision to withdraw funding as “based on serious deviations from the values of sport and deviations from the member association’s obligations regarding auditors and auditing according to RF statutes”.

According to SVT’s documentary, the issue appears to be that certain groups have tried to adapt Swedish cricket to the benefit of their own club, for example by getting involved in deciding which teams will play each other, which teams will have the most home games, or even choosing the players for the national team.

Later that year, the club went through a financial crisis, ending the contracts of everyone in its headquarters. It was issued a list of necessary measures which need to be taken in order for it to requalify for economic support and remain a member of RF, including hosting courses in association democracy and tightening up the association’s statutes in order to “reduce the risk of non-democratic elements at annual meetings”.

What happens now?

In December last year, RF granted the cricket association a loan of 750,000 kronor “after the association could show that it has begun measures in accordance with the action plan which are going in a positive direction”.

“There are still major shortcomings, but we see a greater understanding from the association of what needs to be done, and a plan for carrying out that work,” SF vice chairman Toralf Nilsson said at the time.

“This gives us hope that they will be able to solve their challenges and create methods to work with democratic governance, prioritising knowledge of associations and work with where work to build knowledge of running an association as well as work on basic values must be prioritised.

The loan must be paid back by August 2024.

Do you know more about this? Get in touch with us at [email protected]. You can watch SVT Sport’s investigation into this topic here.

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