1. Royal Shrovetide Football
This game was originated in a small village of Ashbourne, England.
Two soccer matches are held every year at the beginning of Lent in Ashbourne, with teams consisting of almost every single man, woman and child in the village and some tourists.
Like all the best sports, Royal Shrovetide Football does not have any rules. The only official regulation seems to be "no murder." The game begins at 2 p.m, after a local dignitary tosses a ball into a swirling mass of hundreds of terrifyingly large men and screaming women and children. The mobs then try and move the ball towards their goal areas. Essentially, it is a rolling, 8-hour fist fight between the Up''Ards and Down''Ards (people born north or south of the town river).
The ''pitch'' is the entire town and the goal posts are the sites of old mills, three miles apart and a goal is scored when someone bangs the ball against a post thrice. Though called football, the ball can be kicked or thrown, and possession can and does change hands by the virtue of simple, honest violence.
Origin:
Because a fire destroyed the records in the 1890s, no one knows when the sport began, though some insist it was played as early as the 1300s, and that in the original games the ball was a severed head, tossed to the baying crowd following a public execution.
2. Kabaddi
Where: India
Kabaddi is an Indian team game and can be called as a cross between tag and wrestling.
Two teams of 12 (seven playing, five in reserve) face each other on a court just over half the size of a basketball court. One team sends a raider into the opponents territory, who must not draw breath whilst he is there (laws dictate the raider must constantly chant ''Kabaddi,'' thus eliminating any "hey, I saw you breathe!", "No, my mouth is closed!", "You breathed through your nose, I saw you!" arguments).
The raider'' job is to ''tag'' his opponents and get out without being caught. Tagged opponents are out, but if the raider is wrestled to the ground until he draws breathe, then he is out the game. Traditional garb for teams is socks and boxer shorts, or sometimes briefs.
Origin:
No one quite knows when Kabaddi started; though Indians claim they have concrete evidence the game was played 4,000 years ago, presumably in the form of primitive drawings of men chasing each other in their underpants.
3. World Mountain Bike Bog Snorkelling Championships
Where: Wales
It is a bizarre aquatic race where the participants don full wetsuit and snorkel rides an expensive mountain bike into a filthy bog just outside the small Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells.
Entrants are timed as they cycle two lengths of the Waen Rhydd bog, which is 6-feet deep and 45-feet long, on a bicycle with a frame filled with lead. Toppling off your bike isn''t penalized, and neither is puking from the fetid stench.
The sport draws competitors from all over the world, and is quite famous with crazy fads.
Origin:
The sport began in 2000 and was developed from the similar, non-bike-related Bog Snorkelling Championships. Both were the brainchild of a local pub landlord, who dreamt it up after drinking a lot of booze.
4. Chess Boxing
Where: Finland.
As the name implies it is pretty much a hybrid sport combining chess and boxing, one that the organizers claim is the ultimate test of brains and brute force. Competitors play a round of chess and then box the living hell out of each other.
The game is split into 11 four-minutes alternating rounds of chess and boxing, starting and ending with the chess. At the end of the chess round, the board is removed from the boxing ring and the competitors then beat the living daylight out of each other for next four minutes. Then the board is replaced and the thinking caps come back into action. Winning comes either from a checkmate or a knockout.
One can immediately find out the biased nature of the game. A good boxer can simply sleepwalk through the opening chess round, and then beat his opponent unconscious once the boxing starts. In other words, it''s possible to win without knowing anything at all about chess.
Origin:
The game in its current format actually is a brainwork of Serbian cartoonist Enki Bilal, who penned a graphic novel featuring the game in 1992, but purists argue that the game was originally conceived in the 1991 Finnish film Uuno Turhapuro, Herra Helsingin herra, in which a man makes chess moves over a hands-free telephone headset while simultaneously beating the shit out of another man. This makes one wonder why they don''t do actual chess boxing that way, but who are we to tell them how to do their jobs.
5. Jai-Alai
Where: The Basque region of Spain and France.
A game played in an open-walled arena where a rock-hard ball is hurled against the wall with a speed of more than 180 miles an hour. Jai-Alai is ''the fastest sport on Earth'' as the people of Basque calls it.
The game is played like squash, but a version of squash that could only have been dreamt up by sun-damaged Spaniards. Players sling the ball at a wall using a specially designed wicker called cesta basket with a curved glove attached, approximately 25-inches long. On the rebound, a player from the opposing team catches the ball in his scooped racquet before flinging it back at the wall.
If the ball is dropped, missed or flung out of bounds, or if a player drops his bat and squeals in terror when the ball flashes past his head, then a point is conceded.
Origin:
The first recorded history of Jai-Alai was the building of an indoor arena in 1798 in Spain, and the game spread to Spain'' Central-American and Caribbean colonies throughout the 1800s. It was briefly popular in some parts of the USA in the ''70s, but it popularity has waned as athletes found other activities more rewarding than trying to dodge a ball moving fast enough to castrate them on impact.
P.S: We do not call it the fastest sport on the planet rather we consider it to be a bizarre game played by crazy freaking nomads whose mental development got arrested at a very tender age.
6. The Eton Wall Game
Where: England, at Eton College.
This hotchpotch of rugby and soccer is being played at an exclusive English private school ... for more than 300 years. It happens on the same strip of land with a long, slightly curved wall down one side and often devolves into a multi-limbed pile of shrieking schoolboys.
Two teams try to get the ball into a scoring zone, and then kick it against a target (a garden door for one team and a tree for the other). Sounds simple, until you realize that the mode of moving the ball into position requires players of both teams to pile up along the wall and slowly inch the ball up field, to the extreme discomfort of players buried in the pile.
Every now and again, the ball pops free and someone boots it up field, which precipitates a crazed scramble to retrieve the ball, whereupon the whole process starts again.
Origin:
The first recorded incidence of the game being played was in 1766, though the most important game of the year is the St. Andrews Day game, first played in 1844. We like to pretend that it began to give the English social elite something to do when they became bored of shooting the working class or going to war against a bunch of Pacific Islanders armed with sticks.
7. Buzkashi
Where: Central Asia, principally Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.
It is the national sport of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and other Central Asian nations. It involves a large amount of ululating Arabs tearing around a large area on horseback, trying to wrestle the carcass of a goat from each other in an apparent effort to reaffirm every negative stereotype the world has about them.
The two mounted teams try to throw the dead goat over a goal line or into a tub. This elicits a great deal of enthusiasm, so we assume it constitutes scoring a point. Play is rough, and competitors often wear protective clothing to protect themselves from other riders'' boots, whips and probably stray bullets.
Origins:
No idea whatsoever. The good people of Central Asia who started this game, were too much engrossed to write anything down for future posterity.
8. Eukonkanto (Wife Carrying)
Where: Finland.
The "wife-carrying" thing isn''t a metaphor. A gentleman heaves his wife onto his back and races through a special obstacle course, perhaps while she berates him the whole way about each little mistake.
The rules say the "wife" that gets carried can be your own, or a friend'', or pretty much anyone''. The competitors dash down a 250-meter track, with two jumps and a water trap. A dropped wife incurs a 15-second penalty for the team and, presumably, dog-turd casserole for a week.
Origin:
The sport originated years ago as a joke in Finland and continued ever since.
9. Hurling
Where: Ireland.
An Irish sport which appears to be a fusion of field hockey, soccer, football and unremitting, pants-wetting terror.
The game is played with axe-like sticks called hurleys or "camáns" and a small, hard ball. Two teams, each with 15 Irishmen of attempt to score goals by smacking the ball as hard as possible, at head height and at terrifying speeds.
Origin:
Hurling'' origins are based on some kind of energetic outdoor activity participated in by ancient Gaels that most people refer to as ''warfare.'' When the Irish began to migrate overseas, they attempted to set up hurling leagues in their adopted countries, but everyone else was too frightened and/or were mentally sound to avoid this kind of barbaric sport.
10. The Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake
Where: A small corner of the British Isles.
It involves up to 20 competitors chasing a block of cheese down a hill.
The competitors climb up to the top of the almost-impossibly steep Cooper''s Hill and chase a large n wheel of double Gloucester cheese down to the bottom. The winner is the first person over the line at the bottom of the slope, but theoretically, the winner is supposed to be the person who catches the cheese. The cheese, which is given a one-second head start, reaches speed in excess of 70 miles an hour, so unless a competitor is the T-1000, or has managed to smuggle a motorcycle to the top of the hill, it''s not going to happen.
Life ruining injuries, however, are common.
Origin
No one quite knows when the game started, but it is at least 200 years old, though some say it goes back further and was part of a pagan healing ritual.
