In a surprise move, Hungary invited a Russian team to its annual grave digging competition. In an even bigger surprise the team from Novosibirsk came dead last.

Events like this are popular in Europe, like Britain’s great downhill cheese-wheel-rolling event, Estonia’s annual wife-carrying race or Spain’s La Tomatina food fight in the village of Buñol, Hungary also has the somewhat more macabre competition to see which team can dig a grave the fastest.

With East-West tensions high, Hungary once again thumbed its nose at anti-Russian sentiments in the rest of Europe, and invited the Russian team from Siberia to compete. With more than an estimated million dead and wounded in the Ukraine conflict, Russia has plenty of experience in digging graves, but the team proved to be the slowest on the fields outside of Budapest, where the event was held.

Spade-wielding teams travelled to the small Hungarian village of Szekszárd from Serbia, Czechia and the locals to compete for gold, silver, and bronze medals cast in the shape of a spade.

The contest was held at Alsóvár cemetery on September 6 and organised by the Hungarian Cemetery Managers and Operators Association (Magyarországi Temetőfenntartók és Üzemeltetők Egyesülete) and both professional grave diggers and amateurs are allowed to compete.

Like any high-level athletic sport, the rules are strict. Competitors have to dig a hole that is exactly 1.6-metres deep, 80cm wide and 2-metres long, removing a total of 2.5 cubic metres of soil, in under two hours. The contestants then have to backfill the grave in just 15 minutes (without a coffin of course).

Keeping within the time limit is important but in addition a team of judges evaluated the accuracy of the grave’s dimensions, but there are no points for style or artistic interpretations. The walls of the grave must be perfectly vertical and the bottom perfectly flat. However, in previous years, there was an additional artistic category: teams were given 15 minutes to plant 24 pansies as tastefully as possible on the grave mound and water them before being judged on the arrangement.

In its eighth year, this year a local team of László Kiss and Róbert Nagy won for the third time in a row. The Hungarians from the town of Hajdúböszörmény finished their grave in a record 1:33 hours and 20 seconds to win yet another victory.

They credited their win to long practice as working grave diggers, but claim they did no special training for the event. Hungarian teams also took silver and bronze with times of 1:37 and 1:53.

However, the team from Siberia of Artyom Gorbikov and Sergey Yakushin, who work at the Novosibirsk crematorium, were the first Russian team to participate in the competition. They travelled thousands of miles especially to enter, but finished dead last from a total of 21 teams. Gorbikov and Yakushin put their poor performance down to having to struggle with “difficult ground and in scorching heat", The Insider reported.

Russian teams have been barred from competition in the Olympics and other major sporting events, but so far have not been barred from grave-digging. In 2021, the Russian Grave Company Championship was held in Novosibirsk. The team from Omsk won.