06 July 2008 - It\'s the annual wife carrying races in Finland and husbands have been training hard for the event.People from all over the world travelled to the country of the midnight sun to compete in the bizarre races in which husbands have to carry their spouses around an obstacle course.\n\nPenny Tweedie reports.\n\n\nSONKAJARVI, Finland 05 July 2008 (Reuters)- \n Wife-carrying is one of a host of bizarre contests that Finns, who can tend to gloominess in the long winter dark, have devised for the scant months of summer when the sun hardly sets and people\'s mood turns frolicsome.\n\nForty-eight couples from 13 countries, including Kenya, Australia and Canada, gathered in the remote Finnish village to complete the track.\n\nEstonia reigned supreme once again, as Alar Voogla sprinted home in just over one minute to win the Baltic country\'s 11th title, with Kirsti Viltrop clinging upside-down to his back.\n\n\"Yesterday we have had a really bad luck, because we fell and we lost our first place in the sprint and today it\'s super,\" Viltrop said, after completing the main track.\n\nGermany took away the silver and England the bronze, while hosting Finns had to do with a win for the 100-metre sprint, organised as a side-competition to the world-known event.\n\nWhile some competitors are nearly professional athletes, others do it for fun or as a hobby. Third-place winners Ash Davies and Aila Bruce put extra thought in designing their costume, to get the extra edge.\n\n\"We came with our costume designer all the way from England -- she has designed this especially, so we can compete, streamline you know, aerodynamic tuning,\" Davies said.\n\nSome 5,000 people came to view the event, set deep in forests and lakes a couple of hours\' drive from the Arctic Circle.\n\nThe contest is rooted in the legend of Ronkainen the Robber, said in the 19th century to have tested aspiring members of his gang by forcing themto lug sacks of grain or live swine over a similar course.\n\nIt also purportedly stems from an even earlier tribal practice of wife-stealing, in honour of which many contestants now take up the challenge with someone else\'s wife.\n\nIt has also inspired others to organise events such as sauna sitting,swamp football, cell phone throwing or karaoke singing. All are part of a summer bonanza of events that rake in visitors and cash for as long as the midnight sun shines.\n\n(Reporting by Attila Cser, Writing by Agnieszka Flak) athletics, body, championship, championships, coed, exercise, foreplay, husband, marriage, Olympics, paint, pool, Reuters, sex, water, wives