flickering pictures

From the indefatigable Cool Things in Random Places:

The sport of shin kicking has been around since the 17th century [and was] reborn in 1951 at Chipping Camden, England. Although the games are not quite as brutal as the earlier versions, I’m sure players are secretly rejoicing that they now prohibit iron-capped boots. Players used to prepare for the games by smashing hammers into their shins.

We humans are strange — though this certainly isn’t the strangest sport we’ve come up with. The city of Florence has its Calcio Fiorentino, a bare-knuckle mix of soccer and rugby that allows “head-butting, punching, elbowing, and choking” but wisely prohibits “sucker-punching and kicks to the head,” to keep people from hurting themselves. Turkey has its camel wrestling, California has its world pillow fighting championships, and the U.K. town of Gloucestershire is home to a world-famous cheese-rolling tournament, in which contestants roll cheese off a cliff, run down after it, fall/roll for several minutes and routinely leave with mangled bodies and broken bones. Afghan Buzkashi players vie on horseback for the carcass of a goat in an attempt to throw it over a goal line, and then of course there’s dwarf tossing, mountain bike bog snorkelling and the Hawaiian sport of Papa Holua, which is a lot like snowboarding with no board and no snow.

My favourite, though, has got to be chess-boxing, in which two competitors alternate between four-minute chess rounds and two-minute boxing rounds. A knockout or a checkmate will get you a win, but it seems to me that there’s a pretty big flaw here, and that even a lousy chess player can be a master chess-boxer if he’s really good at bashing the other guy’s face in. How well would Gary Kasparov play chess if he’d just gone two minutes with Evander Holyfield?

A close runner-up is Royal Shrovetide Football, which for 900 years has seen the entire population of Ashbourne, England come out once a year to get positively plastered and play a gigantic no-holds-barred free-for-all rugby match. All the town’s shops and businesses — with the notable exception of the pubs — board up their windows and brace for the unbridled craziness that is this game. There’s really no getting around the fact that these people — like the fellow in the photo to the right — are insane.

Here are the rules according to Wikipedia — and you gotta love that first one:

1. Committing murder or manslaughter is prohibited. Unnecessary violence is frowned upon.
2. The ball may not be carried in a motorised vehicle. [Bikes are okay though.]
3. The ball may not be hidden in a bag, coat or rucksack etc. [Wouldn’t be sporting.]
4. Cemeteries, churchyards and the town memorial gardens are strictly out of bounds. [A little respect, people.]
5. Playing after 10 pm is forbidden. [Probably because that’s when the infirmary closes.]

Image via Cracked.

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