Claim: Sweden has formally recognised sex as a sport and is set to hold its first-ever sex tournament, social media users have alleged.
Verdict: False. An application for sex sports to be recognised as a sport in Sweden was submitted to the Swedish Sports Confederation but rejected.
Full Text
Reports have been circulating online and on social media claiming that Sweden is preparing to host a sex championship. The claim has been widespread, with online websites like The Guardian Nigeria, Complete Sports, and India Today reporting the story.
On Twitter, the claim has been made by @thetatvaindia, and @ghananewsguide, among others. For a Twitter user, @thetatvaindia, the Sweden Sex Federation is set to launch a sex competition called the European Sex Championship, with participants set to engage in multiple sexual activities under some categories.
According to the claim, the categories include penetration, oral sex, seduction, massage of various body parts, and endurance. It added that participants would be set to engage in sexual activities for 40 to 45 minutes.
The claim has received over 3.2 million views and over 2,000 likes.
Verification
A news report published by the Swedish site, Goteborgs-Posten, on April 26, 2023, indicated that Dragan Bratic, a man who formed “The Swedish Sex Federation,” applied for the organisation to join the (RF) in January 2023. (RF is the initial for the Swedish Sports Confederation).
The sport, according to Dragan Bratic, as published by Radio Sweden, indicates he wants sex to be classified as any other sport where practitioners can train and compete. The application, however, was rejected on April 26, 2023. The rejection of the application is contained in a press release by the Swedish Sports Confederation.
It is on the backdrop of this that news portals and social media users took to sharing a claim that sex sports have been included in Sweden’s sporting activities.
DUBAWA continued to find out from the Swedish Sports Confederation whether the sport has been included in its curriculum. It was revealed that there are 87 sports activities in Sweden. This excludes sex sports as purported.
The purported sex competition was scheduled to begin on June 8 in Gothenburg. But checks from major news sites in Sweden revealed that the sites did not report on such a news story.
However, on Thursday, June 8, 2023, some Twitter users shared videos purporting to be the competition’s kick-off. Most of these videos were explicit videos. Users, including @joyosi5, @WithAlvin, @Amasadat, and @BG_Liberty, have all shared the widely circulated video amassing over a million views.
After conducting a Yandex Image search on the keyframes provided by the Invid video verification tool, DUBAWA found out that the widely circulated video is not related to the purported sex championship in Sweden. We discovered that the video circulating dates far back as 2014, as published by a YouTube user, Amicidella Gnocca.
Conclusion
The claim that Sweden is set to host a sex championship is false. The country sports confederation has debunked such a claim, describing it as false.
