You think I’d waste your time with another thread on something as utterly mundane or boring as baseball – get outta here.
No. I’m after strange sports, fans. Weird competitions. Oddball sports practioners and their weirdly enthusiastic fans. Culled from your Doper sieve-like minds search of competitive games in science fiction and fantasy, or possibly in real life. New, little-known, obscure or ancient, near and exotic, or far flung.
I’ll provide these definitions of a “sport,” as opposed to a “game,” which I’m NOT interested in.
(spôrt, spōrt) n.
[ul]Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.
[li]A particular form of this activity.[/li][li]An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.[/li][li]An active pastime; recreation.[/ul][/li]
PLEASE don’t just make something up. Usual multimedia references and citations apply. Links with pictures, great.
If it appeared in STRANGE SPORTS STORIES, ya got an automatic winner! Remember dinosaur racing?
How about Fierljeppen which is a Frisian sport that consists of pole-vaulting across small canals and ditches. It has formalized rules and organized competitions. There is even a Dutch Fierljeppen Association.
Then there is Kaatsen, another Frisian sport that is basically team handball played on a grass field. Again there is a Royal Dutch Kaats Association.
There’s a BIG one from Harry Potter novels: The Triwizard Tournament, the magic competition between the wizarding schools of Hogwarts, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. More at here.
There’s some other Hogwarts competition people get all worked up about. Durned if I can remember what it IS, though. Gnome-tossing? Flying cars? Illegal animagi? 'S something.
This thread is getting off to a slow start. Okay – here’s another one strange sport, which I last recall reading about in GLOBAL FREQUENCY before I swapped my trades with Selkie in March.
The urban sport of parkour - it’s particpants treat the city like a moving obstacle course. It’s got a website, interestingly enough, with pictures. This one’s so new it hasn’t even been written up on Wkipedia yet!
In its early days, ABC’s Wide World of Sports specialized in offbeat sports (to Americans, anyway). I remember things like Gaelic Football, Hurling, and Australian Football.
Does 43-Man Squamish count? I know that teams were formed back in the 60s.
