Listing 4 of the World’s Strangest Sports

Sport has the power to bring people together. It has the power to immortalize humans, it can create rivalries that last centuries, and can ensure that people of a certain place are filled with pride or even shame. Sport is ageless. The definitions of what is considered sport may have changed, but its power remains unmatched in how it can make people feel. 

The list of the following sports is proof that where people dwell, sports will arise, develop, and captivate. With the help of Alex Goldstein, betting expert from mybettingsites.com/ca, listed below are some of the world’s strangest sports, but also some of the most passionately supported within the microcosms in which they exist. 

4 of the Strangest Sports in the World

• Calcio Storico
• Highland Games
• Kok Boru
• Mokepung Lampit

1. Calcio Storico

Too small to be war. Too violent to be a game. That is what onlookers from the Italian city of Florence have described their homegrown sport as. Any sports fan watching Calcio Storico for the first time will need to pick their jaw up that had dropped on the floor. 

The game is ferocious in nature. It is competed by two teams, and the aim of the game is to place a roundball into the opposite team’s goal, sounds like football right? Wrong. One of the ball-moving strategies that the teams are legally able to access is bare-knuckle boxing. Players can run with the ball, pass it, and get into full-blown fist fights with opposing teams to ensure that the ball is advanced. 

The players of the game? Your regular guys who hold down day jobs, but who also spend hours upon hours in the gym preparing for the championship in the third week of June. The explosive nature of the sport means that only three matches are played a year. The team that wins all three of their matches, wins the championship. 

2. Highland Games

The best way to sum up the highland games is this. The Olympics meets medieval England. Don’t tell a Scottish person this assessment, as the Highland Games are a great source of national pride in the north of Britain.

The highland games are steeped in history, and spectators can expect far more than simply watching competitors contest in archaic measures of strength. The festivals, held majorly in Scotland, but also in some other countries, are made what they are by the music, dance, and culture on show that shoulders the behemoth men and women who participate in the events. One of the flagships of these festivals is the Braemar gathering, which is attended by the Royal Family. 

The Caber Toss is arguably the most iconic of the events, wherein men and women are tasked with tossing an enormous log. The log is placed in an upright position, and the competitors balance the log on their shoulders, with their hands wrapped around the small end of the log. The log then needs to be flipped and depending on how it lands, it will be considered a successful attempt. The ideal toss involves a log that falls as close to 12 o clock on an imaginary clock, wherein the log is the arm of the clock. 

3. Kok Boru

If you’ve got a thing for goals, physicality, and horse riding, then Kok Boru is definitely worth a shout for you. Kok Boru, however, is a little different than most games in which the objective is to score goals. In Kok Boru, the ball is a dead goat. Yes, you read that right, a dead goat. 

Kok Buro is played on horseback, with the objective of carrying a goat carcass into a goal zone. While there are a number of different iterations of the game played throughout central Asia, each of these has had pretty much the same origin story. Early reports suggest that Kok Boru was played between people using a dead wolf as the ball, and it is said to have been competed by farmers, who had grown frustrated by wolves killing their livestock. The use of the dead perpetrators of much of their misery was said to be somewhat of a celebration. 

The teams in Kok Boru consist of anywhere between 10 (Aghanistan version), and 12 (Kyrgyzstan version), riders, with either four or five riders being able to play at a given time. Games can either split into halves, or three periods, varying in length, and the pitch is essentially a sandy stretch roughly the length of two football fields. 

The game is known for its physical nature and is among the most strange with regards to the equipment used, and some of the tactics. 

4. Makepung Lampit

Racing fans, this one is for you. Unique to Western Bali’s Jembrana region, there is a different kind of racing on show that has gathered the attention of sports fans. Makepung Lampit is the sport of water buffalo racing, which takes place on flooded rice fields. 

The race is competed by four racers, over a 125m straight stretch, and can only be described as electric. Locals dress the bulls in elaborately coloured materials, taking this already electrifying spectacle to another level. 

While racing on the back of animals is nothing too new or special, doing so on carts being carried forward by colourful water buffaloes through flooded rice fields puts this into the category of special, unique, and strange sports all at once.