1. Camel Wrestling Is Mostly What It Sounds Like
Some sports are very much born of the period and location in which they were formed. No one in Idaho was going to develop surfing, and snowboarding was unlikely to emerge from the Australian bush. So the western portions of Turkey were only going to come up with so many different sports depending on what was available for people to play about with. And that’s how camel wrestling was created.
Amazingly, this sport has a solid 2,400 years of history and the name isn’t allegorical or deceptive in any way. In 2011, 20,000 people gathered out to witness camel wrestling in Selcuk, illustrating just how popular this bizarre sport truly is.
Camels are naturally aggressive when they believe they’re about to mate and there are other guys nearby to compete with. So in the sport, men are introduced to females in heat and then thrown in an arena together. They put gear on to keep them from biting each other but otherwise it’s simply two male camels fighting for a girl. The winner either knocks the other camel down or makes it flee away.It’s been likened to Spanish bullfighting in terms of cultural importance and tradition.
Just as puzzling as the sport is the reality it truly affords no one engaged any advantage. The camels don’t really get to procreate and the human owners don’t even earn money off of it. It’s been labelled a “rich man’s sport” simply because it costs a lot of money and only gives short entertainment returns. The winner of the 2011 competition earned a machine-made rug.
2. Bokdrol Spoeg or Kudu Dung Spitting Involves Spitting Antelope Poop
You’ll be hard pushed to battle a lot of people who want to watch bokdrol spoeg and even fewer who want to participate. Also known in English as “kudu dung spitting,” this South African sport involves you to take a pellet of faeces from an animal called a kudu, which is a sort of antelope, and then put it in your mouth. You then spit that excrement as far as you can. Whoever spits it the furthest is the winner but it’s hard to declare anybody wins when everyone has a mouthful of excrement.
Despite the fact a kudu is a decent-sized mammal, its excrement is practically rabbit-like in appearance. Just small heaps of spherical pellets. It’s impossible to pinpoint what prompted the first individual to attempt the sport. It has a close similarity to merely spitting out watermelon seeds and it’s completely probable it came born when someone placed one in their mouth believing it was genuine food and then spat it out after realizing what it was, impressing a buddy with the distance. Who’s to say?
3. Death Diving is An Extreme Belly Flop Sport
There are a considerable variety of activities that need the use of a swimming pool, from diving to water polo to simple competitive swimming. One thing most aquatic sports have in common, though, is that if you manage belly flop into the water during the course of that activity, you undoubtedly screwed up.
There’s no elegance to a belly flop and usually it’s simply unpleasant and painful. So of course someone made it a sport and somehow made it more hazardous and unpleasant.
Known as dødsing in its native Norway, the sport isn’t strictly belly flopping from 10 meters in the air, it simply might be that. The objective is to leap and hold your body in an X-formation with arms and legs out. Then, at the last possible time, bring your arms and legs in to fall in the water in a more safe, non-belly flop posture.
The longer you can hold off, the better. And, presumably, if your timing is incorrect, you’re landing that belly flop.
There are national finals every year and word has it that there have been some significant injuries ranging from broken noses to punctured lungs.
4. German Wok Racing
Luge, bobsled, skiing and snowboarding all involve someone travelling down a snowy slope at fast speeds and you’d think that four sports would have covered all the manner you could accomplish such a thing. Turns , that’s not exactly accurate since Germany came up with wok racing. The sport is largely the same as all the others, with the crucial variation being you’re going downhill in a wok.
While the sport began as nothing more than a novelty, it eventually became bafflingly popular. Over 3.6 million Germans turned in to watch broadcast races. Six thousands people turned out for the 2010 championships and the sport somehow even managed to sell out with fans and the media decrying how commercial it got with every imaginable surface of the competitors clothing plastered in sponsor logos.