I’m surprised no-one has mentioned five-pin bowling. Only in Canada.
We have a few places here in Rhode Island.
ETA: Looking these places up I don’t see that they clearly have candlepins, they may all just be duckpin alleys.
The fact that Wikipedia’s image is of a small child trying to roll the ball between his legs says all about five pin bowling that needs to be said.
There are plenty of lanes in ME, NH, CT. It looks like VT only has a handful of candlepin lanes and RI has more duckpin than I would have thought. But you’re right that MA is the center of the candlepin universe.
Saw this once when live in Firenze. What a mess, bloody and entertaining.
Sumo is not even the most popular sport in Japan; Baseball is. Wikipedia even lists association football and golf above Sumo in terms of fan popularity of the professional leagues there. Ok, sure, Sumo is much bigger in Japan than anywhere else, and it’s certainly their national sport, but the two Gaelic games are the most popular sports in Ireland, but Sumo is not in Japan.
Also, professional Sumo has dominated by Mongolians for the last 10-15 years. In January of this year a Japanese wrestler won the top division title in one of the 6 major annual tournaments for the first time in exactly ten years; most of the roughly 60 between them were won by Mongolians with a couple by Eastern Europeans. In the 5 years before that, Japanese wrestlers won less than half, around a dozen out of thirty. I don’t think Gaelic sports are dominated by English or French players, although I certainly could be wrong.
It’s very common in Maine.
The Germans love handball. It’s actually pretty cool. Kind of like hand-hockey.
Handball is an Olympic sport, so it must have a widespread following.
At the rate things are going, soccer may eventually surpass baseball as Japan’s most popular sport; the J-league has grown very rapidly. (The baseball leagues have also recently set attendance records but the rate of growth is, by virtue of its maturity, not the same.) Both are insanely popular and obviously in terms of participation rates, not a lot of Japanese actually take their kids out on Tuesdays to go play a little sumo. (ETA: Actually, I looked it up afterwards and J-League attendance is not as high as I had believed. They’re further behind baseball than I thought.)
A sport’s status as the “National sport” is not necessarily related to its popularity. Canada for a long time recognized lacrosse as its national sport, a fact which was the subject of many a trivia question because most Canadians just assumed that it was hockey; lacrosse is not only not the most popular sport, it isn’t in the top five and might not crack the top ten. Baseball is famously America’s National Pastime <TM> but the football league is the bigger league, and football is also more popular at the high school and college levels. Speed skating as basically what Dutch people are good at, but like most places, the most popular sport is soccer.
And of course, as I’m fonding of blathering about, “popularity” depends on whether you are referring to spectation or participation. How do you measure the popularity of a sport in, say, the USA? If it’s bythe number of people who pay to see a game, the answer is baseball, by a mile. If it’s by how willing people are to watch the game on TV, however, it is football by TWO miles. But if it’s by the number of people who actually play the sport, football suddenly falls off the list, and sports like soccer, golf and basketball vault upwards. Spectation and participation do not necessarily correlate at all. A man who enjoys watching football and NASCAR will then, on Saturday afternoons, go play a round of golf, or perhaps go swimming, as his preferred personal sport, because while football and NASCAR may be fun to watch they are rather difficult for most people to play.
Nowhere is it as popular as in Belgium, where it’s televised and more people have heard of Sven Nys than Romelu Lukaku, but it’s a popular niche sport in a lot of countries with a competitive cycling scene. Maybe popular is not the right word, as it’s not something you do casually, but its heritage and reputation (well-deserved), as the sport of hard men, ensures it’s one of the fundamental disciplines of cycling - every major bike manufacturer carries a cyclocross bike in their range, for example.
Very versatile sport compared with mountain biking, for example - in a big country like the US you could easily live miles and miles away from any decent trails. But you can put on a good cyclocross race pretty much anywhere you’ve got a field and some small inclines. We get up to 200 people at our local races in northwest England during the season, which is pretty good for a niche sort of activity.