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Morning GIF: The Finnish Hockey Handshake

OK, it's neither Finnish nor is it a handshake. We're pretty sure it was at a hockey game, though.

 

Lorraine Murphy

Streaming

Posted on May 28, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 4:35 pm CDT

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Latvia: where awkward sports handshakes go to die.

The importance, in professional sports, of a self-assured and brotherly handshake cannot be denied. We’ve reported on the phenomenon ourselves—and spent the following three weeks replying politely to hate mail. Sports fans take these things seriously.

We didn’t know quite how seriously, however, until we saw this: the infamous Finnish Hockey Handshake. We, ourselves, went fetal with vicarious embarrassment.

It’s one thing to mess up a handshake. It’s quite another to go in for a bro-tastic fistbump, get palmed off in an aborted high-five, and then come back high-fiving, only to bunt against your co-coach’s attempted fistbump. Awesome.

When it comes to mortifying coach gestures: we rule Latvia the clear winner. This GIF of their team coaches has had more than 922,000 views, which is surely worthy of some sort of medal, if only for managing to lay the blame on Finland by clever mis-labeling.

 


 

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*First Published: May 28, 2012, 9:36 am CDT