Sticky Fingers: Why Handball Is Australia's Worst Ever Olympic Sport

More than 400 Australian athletes will follow their flag into Maracana Stadium when the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics takes place on August 5.

From archery to wrestling, and fencing to synchronized swimming, Aussies will be compete for medals in almost every sport in Rio.

But one place where you won't see the Green and Gold colours is on Rio's Olympic handball courts.

Outside the 2000 Olympics in Sydney—where the Australian mens and womens teams received automatic host spots—no athletes from Down Under have competed in handball.

It is the one Olympics sport Australia has never qualified a team for.

Though it has its roots in ancient Rome, modern handball has been mostly played since the late nineteenth century. It involves two teams of seven passing a ball via hand, and attempting to score in a small football-like goal at each end of a 40m indoor court.

When first included at the Olympics, in 1936, it was played outdoors by 11 people on a football field. After World War II, it was removed from the schedule, only to return in 1972 in its current form.

Around 30 million people are estimated to play handball worldwide, mostly in Northern Europe. The most powerful nations are Germany, Sweden, Denmark and France.

Sydney's Bevan Calvert is the captain of the Australian men's handball team. The 30-year-old plays semi-professionally for MV Mecklenburg Schwerin; a third-tier handball club in Germany. Also working as a personal trainer, he has been based in Germany for the last seven years.

Calvert, who grew up in the northwestern Sydney suburb of Turramurra, first gave handball a shot as a teenager to "try something different" at high school.

"Me and my mates … saw it on the school sports list," Calvert told VICE Sports AUNZ.

"When you think about handball in Australia, you think about the tennis ball in the schoolyard game. I thought, well that'll be pretty funny playing competitive handball, so we went to try-outs – and found that it was the Olympic handball."

"I love the dynamics of the sport," he continued.

"It's always switched on and there is always something happening. It's the second fastest land sport behind ice hockey."

Highlights of Australia vs Kosovo last year

Calvert led his team—ranked 40th in the world—to the Asian Qualification tournament in Qatar last November, where they lost all four pool matches. Their tightest defeat was by five points to China; the tournament's other whipping boys. Despite Calvert's enjoyment of handball and relative personal success, the Australian national teams are absolute easybeats, internationally.

The women's team didn't even take part in qualification.

Australia's best international result was finishing 21st at the 2003 Men's World Championships in Portugal, where they beat fellow minnows Greenland.

Handball is one of Australia's smallest sports in terms of participation, with only several thousand estimated to play. The costs of fostering growth of handball are restricted by cost of hiring gyms and indoor courts—and use of a resin substance nicknamed 'sticky'—on the ball and hands of players, which obviously ruins the facilities.

"It's definitely very grassroots," Calvert says.

The Australian Handball Federation (AHF) was founded in the 1985, but didn't get any widespread attention until the 2000 Olympics where Australia received their automatic host spots.

Both teams finished dead last in their pools. Calvert says the sport missed its opportunity for growth in Australia after 2000, due to a lack of support.

"We had a lot of development heading into the Olympics, but it was unfortunate that, after the Olympics, we didn't have the infrastructure to help all the interested people play handball," he says.

Support hasn't been strong since Sydney, either. The AHF largely operates as a volunteer organization. Success for the sport and state funding unfortunately are a real chicken-and-egg dilemma for handball, Calvert says.

Competing in Qatar last November only occurred through crowd-funding and players paying their own way.

"It's pretty cutthroat," he says. "We are an Olympic sport, but haven't qualified since the Sydney Olympics, so the funding has certainly decreased from the AOC.

"It's hard to get back the money we need to help the sport grow. We're definitely struggling, and without sponsors, that's another bag of problems we have got."

Highlights of a Australia vs New Zealand youth handball game earlier this year

Handball's world federation are understood to be on the cusp of sending Australia down the football route, combining the nation into Asia for big tournament qualification.

It's an idea that Calvert supports—and it might be the seed his sport has been waiting to grow from. Expect that growth to be slow, though—and don't expect any Green and Gold on Olympic handball courts any time soon.

"In all other [Olympic] disciplines, we've always got a competitor or team going, except for handball," he says.

"They're always asking what is happening, but it's this terrible devil's circle that we need money to get the sport better. Without that money, we can't get better."