Sunday River wife-carrying champs head to Finland World Championships

A record 58 couples competed in Sunday River’s 27th Annual North American Wife Carrying Championship, with Kim and Ben Haapapuro crossing the finish line first to earn a trip to the World Championship in Finland next summer.

Under the team name “Haapapuroply Ever After,” the Maine pair earned the traditional haul: their grand prize equaled the woman’s body weight in beer and five times her weight in cash, roughly seven cases of beer and just over $600.

The contest unfolded on a 278-yard obstacle course that Sunday River describes as built to international specifications. Runners must clear a log hurdle, vault over a sand dune and negotiate a water obstacle locals call the “widow maker.” Couples choose their own carrying method, though the Estonian style — the woman’s thighs resting on the carrier’s shoulders, like an inverted piggyback — is the most common. Helmets are optional, if frequently worn.

Qualifying at Sunday River is only the first step. The World Championship, officially the Wife Carrying World Championships, takes place in Sonkajärvi, Finland, on the last Saturday in July, where the carrying continues until one team crosses the 253.5-meter course in the fastest time.

The sport’s modern rules are unusually flexible about who competes. Couples need not be legally married, and participants need not be a man and a woman. The only hard exclusion: same-sex teams cannot advance to the Finnish Worlds under the event’s own regulations.

Sunday River traces the tradition to Finnish folklore involving Herkko Ronkainen, a legendary bandit nicknamed Ronkainen the Robber. The story goes that men carried women they had abducted through rugged wilderness as a test of strength, with the toughest earners earning a place in Ronkainen’s gang. Whether or not the tale is historical fact, competitive wife carrying is now an organized international sport with national championships across North America, Europe and Australia.

At the World Championship, the winner’s prize is likewise tied to body weight — the champion receives the carrying partner’s weight in beer. The global event has been running for decades, and the U.S. national circuit funnels winners like the Haapapuros into the Sonkajärvi competition each year.

The New England event drew its largest-ever field, according to Sunday River, continuing a two-and-a-half-decade run as one of North America’s premier wife-carrying contests.