Norway's viral Viking Row celebration steals WC spotlight

FE Team | Published: July 01, 2026 23:26:09

ARLINGTON, Texas, July 01 (Agencies): The drum descended the stands like a sanctified relic, passed hand over hand through sections of fans who wouldn't let it touch the ground.
By the time it traveled from the third deck to the pitch at Dallas Stadium, Norway had already done the hard part: a 2-1 win over Ivory Coast, sealed by Erling Haaland's 86th-minute winner, the country's first knockout-round win in its World Cup history.
Erling Haaland savored the moment after Norway won a knockout game at the World Cup for the first time, a celebration that included a horned helmet atop his head and again sitting on the field with teammates to do the Viking Row in synch with their red-clad fans.
"This is unbelievable. This is history," Haaland said on the field after the game.
A slight tap from Haaland's left foot in the 86th minute was the difference as Norway beat Ivory Coast 2-1 on Tuesday, setting up another World Cup match against five-time champion Brazil - 28 years after a victory that many consider the greatest ever for the Norwegians.
For now, they prefer to enjoy their latest accomplishment.
Captain Martin Odegaard took the drum from the stands, placed it on the grass with his team-mates sitting behind him, and raised the stick high.
What happened next has become familiar to anyone who has followed Norway's run through this tournament. The crowd above (red and blue, with Viking helmets scattered throughout) needed no instruction. They sat down in their seats, in the aisles. They reached forward, pulled back, and shouted "RO!" in time with the drum, the chant building speed as the beat quickened, arms moving in unison through a stadium full of many people who, a month ago, had no real reason to know what any of this meant.
The ritual is called the Viking Row, and it works the same way every time, whether it's happening on a pitch in Arlington or a subway platform in Queens. Fans sit down in a line, one behind the other, lean back and pull their arms toward their chests in unison, as if hauling an oar through water, while a leader keeps time on a drum and the group chants "ro" (Norwegian for "row") faster as the beat speeds up. In Dallas on Tuesday, the drum leader was in the third deck, and fans throughout the stadium followed his lead perfectly.It has done what its creators hoped, giving a country without a World Cup appearance in nearly three decades something simple to rally around. But it has also done something they didn't fully anticipate: it has become one of the defining images of the North American World Cup, performed by people with no connection to Norway at all.
The gesture went viral in the US after a video of Norwegian fans rowing up a Boston escalator gained millions of views. Since then, it's been done on the floor of a New York City subway car, in the middle of Times Square, and by a section of fans at a Mets game who probably needed a distraction from their team.
The trend now attracts participants regardless of soccer ties; in Arlington on Tuesday, free agent NFL quarterback Jameis Winston taught Dallas Mavericks star Cooper Flagg how to row. As Norway's plane landed at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport on Sunday, officers from the Dallas police department and the airport police were seated on the tarmac, doing their own version of the row just outside the aircraft.
"My buddy showed me a video of it like two weeks ago, and I was like, 'That's kind of awesome', and now I'm doing it here with people I met today," said Brett Couch, 37, of Fort Worth, outside the stadium post-game. Behind him, a family of four Norwegian fans sat on the grass doing the row as a foreign correspondent urged them on with a camera.
"Whoever invented the rowing has patented it, I hope," head coach Stale Solbakken said on Monday.The chant is older than it looks, dating back more than a year to Norway's qualifying win over Italy. But the Viking framing was deliberate: a musician and a member of the team's fan club, who dreamed up the chant together, built it around the image of Vikings "returning" to a continent they'd reached long before Columbus.