Sports are with us since the dawn of time – except they weren’t called “sports” but “everyday life”. Most sports you can bet on today are based on skills needed for survival in the distant past. Athletics, especially running, popular among sports betting enthusiasts, were a matter of life and death when humans had to chase prey or escape predators. Combat sports were, as you might have expected, have grown out of the many forms of fighting in humanity’s long history. And even team sports like soccer and basketball have a real-life necessity at their basis: working as a team for a common goal has helped humanity take on dangerous foes in history – and it does so today.
There are in turn a few sports that are simply… weird, strange enough for us not to even try to decipher their origins.
Kabaddi (Bangladesh)
The game “Tag” is probably familiar for most of you – it’s a common game present on pretty much every playground around the world. Except in Bangladesh, where it’s called “Kabaddi” and it’s a serious team-based contact sport.
Played between two teams of seven players each, the goal of the game is for a single player on offence – often called “the raider” – to run onto the opposing team’s half on the playfield, tag as many defenders as possible, then return to their own half without being tackled. All this in a single breath.
(photo: Wikipedia)
Kabaddi can be played in a traditional form (on a circular court, outdoors) or in a modern variant (on a rectangular court, indoors or outdoors). The sport has an international governing body – the International Kabaddi Federation based in India – and players, and teams, from countries ranging from Australia to Kenya and Sierra Leone.
Tuk-tuk Polo
Polo is a lot like field hockey on horseback: mounted athletes, equipped with long-handled wooden mallets are trying to get the ball into their opponents’ goals. A traditional spectator sport in many countries, polo started out as a simple game played by the people, only to become a sport for the elites later on.
A tuk-tuk is the motorized version of the Asian rickshaw, a three-wheeled passenger cart pulled by a person.
The combination of the two is perhaps one of the weirdest-looking sports ever invented, tuk-tuk polo.
Played especially in Sri Lanka, tuk-tuk polo is exactly what it sounds like: a variation of horseback polo played using tuk-tuks as a means of transport. Unlike the original game that involved one rider per horse, this variant has two people in the tuk-tuk: one that drives and another that chases the ball. Arguably, this makes the game harder than it seems.
Extreme Ironing
Extreme sports come in all shapes and sizes, from bungee jumping to BASE jumping – each one more dangerous than the other. And then there’s Extreme Ironing, an extreme sport that’s not only a dangerous feat but it’s also perhaps the most shocking combination of activities that one can imagine.
Extreme Ironing is literally ironing taken to the extreme. Its practitioners take ironing boards to some of the unlikeliest places on our planet, from mountaintops to the bottom of the sea. And it’s not just the ironing board – it’s the appliance as well. It’s not only taking an ironing board and iron in an extreme location, it’s using it to iron a piece of textile that’s the goal of this activity.
One of the most recent extreme ironing feats was that of Roland Piccoli, a freediver who ironed a T-shirt at a depth of 42 meters in the world’s deepest pool (Y-40) in Montegrotto Terme Italy, in 2018.
