Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
It’s a sporty briefing today, with Swiss footballer Alisha Lehmann (pictured) posing with fans after a training session ahead of a UEFA qualifying match against Hungary tomorrow.
We also look at the surprisingly colourful Swiss kit for the Paris Olympic Games, unveiled yesterday, and sports betting in Switzerland: how popular is it? How do people do it? And why do all profits from sports betting in Switzerland have to go towards charitable projects?
In the news: Covid wealth, concerns about Middle East violence, an AI car camera, a convicted cheesemaker, and snail farming.
The Covid pandemic had a negative impact in many areas, but the bank account of the average Swiss wasn’t one of them. A study examined income and wealth trends from 2007 to the most recent data from 2020, during which time the average income in Switzerland rose by 12.5% to just over CHF71,000 ($77,973).
Switzerland has strongly condemned Hamas’s recent rocket fire on Israel and Israel’s attacks on a camp for displaced people in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Swiss UN Ambassador Pascale Baeriswyl said at the UN Security Council in New York yesterday that Switzerland was extremely concerned about the spiral of violence in the Middle East, which reached a new level at the weekend.
A car camera has been developed in Switzerland that will recognise obstacles 100 times faster than previous driver-assistance systems. In the future this technology, developed by researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH), will help cars to brake in time if a pedestrian suddenly runs into the road.
A district court in central Switzerland has convicted a cheesemaker of multiple counts of involuntary manslaughter after seven people died after eating cheese contaminated with listeria.
The Swiss parliament wants to promote snail farming and is calling on the government to amend legislation so that small-scale breeding facilities on farms can be authorised.
“Red and white as usual?” asked newspaper Blick, fearing another predictable Swiss sports kit. “No! The new team clothing for Swiss athletes at the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games is a veritable festival of colours.”
One thing was clear at the unveiling in Zurich yesterday by Swiss Olympic partners On and Ochsner Sport: “never before has an Olympic collection been so colourful”, Blick reckonedExternal link. The 2024 Olympic Games take place in Paris from July 26 to August 11.
The basic colour for most of the garments is white or dark blue for the trousers, “which as a basic Swiss colour takes some getting used to”, Blick said, but it added that it was the so-called layers – splashes of colour prominently displayed on most of the outfits – “that create the wow effect”. “Yellow, red, blue, green all flow into each other in this colour spectrum as if it had been sprayed on with a can.”
Head of design Thilo Brunner explained that this palette was the result of the colours of all 26 cantonal flags being mixed together. However, the 20-strong design crew in Zurich added a touch of red and white, “probably for the purists”, Blick said. The jackets worn at the opening ceremony and on the podium contain significantly more red than the rest of the collection.
The new kit was unveiled in the presence of On co-owner Roger Federer, who said he still had various items of clothing from his four Olympic appearances “in his archive”.
The entire collection comprises 24 items, from sports bags and T-shirts to training equipment. Most of the items were made in Portugal, Blick reported. In this article, we asked whether On was getting too greedy for its own good.
With the Olympic Games and the Euro 2024 football tournament just weeks away, bookmakers and punters are looking forward to a summer of betting on sports. But how easy is it to have a flutter in Switzerland?
Don’t be disheartened by the fact that Switzerland are 80-1 to win Euro 2024, which kicks off in Munich on June 14. The range of bets available mean you can come up smiling even if your team is given a solid beating (not that SWI swissinfo.ch encourages irresponsible gambling).
But not all of these bets will be available to people in Switzerland. In this explainer on sports betting in Switzerland, I look at how popular sports betting is in Switzerland, how people can do it, and the effect of Switzerland’s relatively restrictive betting and gambling laws.
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