The most well-known phone- throwing event has been the one involving actor Russell Crowe, who heaved a desk set at a New York hotel clerk in June.

But that could be changing, albeit as slowly as a Scandinavian glacier, as a dedicated band of phone lovers and haters work to make Finland's annual Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships a must-see event.

This year's contest, in late August, drew a record attendance of about 3,000 spectators, mainly Finns, and about 90 contestants, largely from Europe but with a few intrepid Australians and Canadians thrown in. The sport hasn't caught on yet in the U.S., not even in Boston, where Alexander Graham Bell completed the first phone call.

Sponsorships have been hard to come by, but at least costs are low. The essentials are a basket of discarded and broken cell phones, an open space (in Finland, an athletic field, but the Dutch championships were at a beach), chairs for the three judges, measuring tape, and, of course, a Web site. Backers have included one of Finland's leading beer makers and a licorice company.

Cell phone makers, meanwhile, have steered clear. Even giant Nokia, which is based in Finland, has not yet seized on the event. Nor would the company comment for this story.

Germany's Siemens, while acknowledging the annual throwing event makes for a "light-hearted story," concentrates "on very few sponsoring activities leveraging our brand value," a spokeswoman says.

The fact that this year's men's champ, Mikko Lampi, a 23-year-old window maker from Vilppula, Finland, hurled a Siemens cell phone a record 104 yards apparently doesn't qualify as brand-value leverage. But Siemens did express satisfaction at the superior aerodynamics of its product line. "We are happy to observe that even after the end of [the phone's] life, our products still excel through quality," the spokeswoman says.

Birth of a quirk

The event was launched six years ago by Christine Lund, who works at Fennolingua, a translation agency in Savonlinna, about 200 miles northeast of Helsinki. She got the idea when she dropped her own mobile phone into a lake. Her insurance company told her there were thousands of mobile phones in Finnish lakes, which are icebound much of the year.

She also drew inspiration from the fact that Finns are among the most-prolific mobile phone users on the planet, and are continually upgrading to spiffier handsets, leaving behind a growing pile of old ones.