On May 11 the Swedish Long Ash Championship final took place for the second time. The competition was started by Henrik Johansson as a local challenge in the city of Borås in 2019, but it was put on hold for a few years due to the pandemic.
In 2023 Johansson and Mikael Andersson, the owner of the online store Mr Andersons Cigars, decided to make the competition national and add qualification rounds.
“When I moved back after living in Uppsala for three years, we started up again,” Johansson says. “The competition was held at our club Fumar and we had a lot of participants, so I suggested we’d make it into a national championship. ‘Hell, yeah,’ Mikael said, and then we started planning.”
All in all there were seven qualifiers around the country, from Malmö in the south to Örebro in the north. The top three qualified for the final in Borås and a chance for the grand prize; a weekend at InterTabac in Dortmund.
The smoke had rarely settled as Johansson and Andersson started planning this year’s event. Another city was added to the circuit and the season record was set by Jonas Natt och Dag, at Fumar in Borås, with 14 millimeters left on the cigar. The final itself was an extremely tight race. Two millimeters separated the winner, Daniel Nyman from Fumar, from third place. His cigar butt measured 24 millimeters when it was all done and over.
All in all, Johansson was happy with the season.
“All clubs were represented at the final in Borås, and 20 of the 27 who had qualified were present, which was fantastic,” he says. “Now I hope it spreads to Europe, so we can organize a European Championship at one point. Let’s see what the future holds.”
