The most curious and ridiculous sport in the world

By Mauro Mondello28. November 2023

When we refer to sports, we usually think of disciplines such as football, basketball, running and tennis. However, what can be defined as “sport” has much broader boundaries. Here are some of the strangest sports practiced in the world today.

It all started with the net

Football, basketball, training in the gym: these are some of the most played sports in the world, but they are definitely not part of it A strange galaxy of ridiculous specialties Which we are about to comment on. In fact, you certainly can’t compare a tennis match, for example, to an underwater hockey challenge. To make another comparison, you want to put a five-on-five football match with a boxing chess match…there is no comparison!

The sport has always been full of truly amazing options, some of which are newly established, others with centuries-old traditions. Curling, for example, has been considered quaint and meaningless for years, but only in a very short period of time It has gone from being a “weird” sport par excellence Until it is included among the Olympic disciplines.

The origins of curling are said to go back about 700 years, to Scotland in 1500. Two paintings by the great Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, dating from 1565, depict curling workers playing the sport during their rest hours. After all, they really were Scottish immigrants spread the game to Canada At the beginning of the 19th century: Today 90% of practitioners from around the world live in the North American country.

Among the most original sports in the world, there is also, without a doubt, chess: as the name suggests, it is A combination of chess and boxing. The match is played over six chess rounds, each lasting 24 minutes, interspersed with five boxing rounds, each lasting 3 minutes. An illegal time-out, knockout, or checkmate results in victory.

We find evidence of this strangeness in London in the 1970s, but to trace a clear reference point we must reach Enki Bilal, cartoonist He included it in his graphic novel, Fredo Equateur, which was published in 1992. From there, it was the Dutch artist Ibbe Roebling who had the idea of ​​writing down the rules and Make it a real sportwhich today includes more than 2,000 practitioners worldwide.

Staying on the topic of mathematical oddities, we certainly cannot help but mention Willy Wanging, L Throw rubber bootsIt is a system that has been practiced in Finland since the 19th century and then became popular in England in the 1970s. Today there is a world championship, where the men’s world record in rubber shoe throw is about 68 metres, which was set by Finnish Thibaut Looma. Women’s world record holder Sari Tikkun, who threw her shoe more than 40 meters in 1996, is also Finnish. The rules of the game require that men throw a size 43 and women a size 38.

Al-Bazakhashi, where you challenge each other with…goats

Let’s go to a completely different level of weirdness by talking about buzkashi, which to us Europeans is a practice bordering on the absurd, but is instead a historical discipline in Central Asia and even the national sport of Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan. Kazakhstan. It’s a sport with a proverb The central element is the carcass of a goat or calf.

It is played on horseback, traditionally in the desert steppe, and requires picking up the dead animal from the ground, while galloping, by one of the riders facing each other, who must then attempt to move it to a designated area as a sort of football goal. It’s not a team sport, you’re playing against everyone For this reason, as soon as one of the players on horseback takes possession of the corpse, the others try to block his way, standing in front of the door.

If necessary, participants try to prevent the attacking player from depositing the body even by using a whip, either against the opposing rider or against his horse. The objective prize is a horse, plus a lot of honor in the surrounding community. certainly, It’s not the favorite game for animal lovers.

Finally one Underwater hockey is definitely worth mentioning. Two teams, each consisting of 6 players, move to the bottom of the pool, dive freely, and attempt to send the puck, positioned at the base of the pool, into the opponent’s goal. You have to have plenty of breathing and great team coordination, as you take turns rising to the surface to seize territory, before continuing to play. Also known as Octopush, this latest exotic sport was born in the 1950s in the United Kingdom and has been played in Italy since 1997.