Meet Clappy, Russians’ favorite mascot for next year's Ice Hockey World Championship
Public voting has concluded on the mascot selection for the 2016 Ice Hockey World Championship, which will take place in Russia. The winner, with more than 750,000 votes, is a little character named Clappy (“Khlopik”).
According to the drawing’s author, theater artist Olga Mikhailova, Clappy is “something between the Pillsbury dough-boy and a snowman; it’s a modern trend, being round.”
Second prize went to Crooked Bunny, a drawing by a first-grader name Timothy from Cherepovets. It got 726,000 votes—316,000 more than there are people living in Cherepovets.
The Sailor Cat twins attracted a good deal of support, too. The striped shirt version, meant for the games in St. Petersburg, won third place. His red-shirted sibling came in seventh place.
Fourth place went to Gregory the 19-year-old, ill tempered mouse.
There were many other submissions, including Puckeater ("shaiboyed"), a combination of a cat and a hockey puck.
Other mascot finalists included two teakettles, a nesting doll, two (not three) Bogatyrs, a walrus, and a Siberian husky. A panel of experts will choose four mascots from the top twenty finalists, sending them to the next selection stage, where it will be determined definitively who becomes the official mascot of the 2016 Ice Hockey World Championship.
“With Puckeater [shaiboyed], I wanted to combine cats with hockey, so I designed a modern, prototypical cat in the form of a puck,” Ruslan Kasatkin said of his submission.