Finland's Aapo The Angus Rautio Won the Air Guitar World Championships for a Second Year on a Stage Built Over Water
Aapo 'The Angus' Rautio retained his title at the 30th-anniversary Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu with a score of 34.8.
Air guitar is performed without an instrument. Competitors pretend to play a guitar to a piece of music for 60 seconds and are scored by a jury of performing arts professionals. The Air Guitar World Championships were first held in 1996, and this year marked their 30th anniversary.
The 2026 championships ran from 26 to 29 August in Oulu, Finland, as part of the Delta Life festival, with the world final on Saturday 29 August on a stage built over the water. More than 50 competitors from 13 countries took part.
Aapo "The Angus" Rautio of Finland won with a score of 34.8, taking the title for the second year in a row. Nanami "Seven Seas" Nagura of Japan was second with 34.4, and Saladin "Six String Sal" Thomas of the United States was third with 33.4. The margin between first and second was 0.4 points.
Organisers said 5,000 spectators watched on site, with tens of thousands more following on the live stream.
The event is built around a tongue-in-cheek philosophy that wars would end, climate change would stop and bad things would vanish if everyone in the world played the air guitar, summed up in its motto, "Make air, not war".
Oulu is one of the European Capitals of Culture for 2026, and the championships formed part of the city's summer programme alongside the Oulu August Festival.