6 Super Strange Sports Games That You May Love
There are sports games everyone knows and then there are those games likely not part of your sports knowledge repertoire. Some are a reflection of regional cultures while others have a strong global following. Regardless of their popularity, they remind us just how creative the human spirit can be in order to engage in competition, even if it means doing so in strange, otherworldly ways. These 6 sports games will expand your mind beyond basketball and football and allow you to appreciate new ways to challenge the mind and body.
6 Unusual Sports Games
1. Bathtubbing
A quirky sport with a long history and fanatic following is bathtubbing. It involves racing in bathtubs. Competitions are held around the world and the rules vary from one to the other. Some competitions involve elaborately-decorated motor-powered bathtubs, while others keep it simple with plain tubs that are transported with paddles. One event held by the Loyal Nanaimo Bathtub Society was first held in 1967 and runs a 36-miles course.
2. Race Walking
Walking is the most common activity we all engage in on a daily basis, but did you know it is now a sport? Race walking involves competitively walking at a very fast pace. It is a long-distance sport that requires one foot be in contact with the ground at all times and that the supporting leg must straighten from the point of contact with the ground and remain straight until the body passes over it, two rules that are strictly enforced. The sport was developed as an original track and field event at the English Amateur Athletics Association in 1880. Common distances are in between 3,000 meters and 100 kilometers.
3. Artistic Roller Skating
Roller skating is nothing unusual, but did you know there is a competitive sport involving roller skating and in not just one straightforward way? The sport involves several disciplines: figures, freestyle, pairs, dance, solo dance, precision and show teams. It’s a lot like figure skating, only with quad or inline roller skates.
4. Jump Rope Sprint
Discovered in 2010, Jump Rope Sprint is a sport that involves sprinting while jumping rope once per stride. Mark Krull, Stephen Ihli and Eric Small invented the sport and are petitioning to have the sport added to the Olympic Games.
5. Finger Wrestling
A traditional rural sport place in Bavaria, Germany, “fingerhakeln” (finger wrestling) involves two men with the same age and weight sitting face to face and threading their fingers together with a leather band. The German Finger Wrestling Championship has been going on since 1959 and finger wrestling is done with everyone dressed in costumes. While the origin of fingerhakeln in Germany is not entirely known, it is believed that the practice was originally used to settle arguments in southern Germany and Austria.
6. Log Rolling
Started in the 1800s during the great logging era, log rolling originated from the lumberjack and log traditions in the Northeast and Canada. Men were hired to prevent rivers from jamming from logs. Loggers would challenge one another to step and stay on the logs the longest. And so log rolling was born. The first unofficial Log Rolling Championship took place in 1898 in Omaha, Nebraska. The sport didn’t get established in Canada officially until the 1960s. The sport requires that competitors roll the log on a body of water by walking atop it. The competitor who stays on the log the longest without falling is declared winner.
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Photo Credit: Najots
