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Granted – there’s nothing like a sporting event to bring out the
best and worst of a culture. (Consider the barmy army and then contrast them with the
yobs, one a Union Jack-flying beer-drinking lot that follows the English cricket team
around and the other a lot of louts and a law and order nightmare for any town that the
English team may be playing football in.) But – while ‘the best’ and
‘the worst’ is all very well, there is a whole spectrum of qualities between the
two extremes. Perhaps because they’re held on a smaller, more intimate scale these
come to the fore with the lesser known sports, which is why we need to see them.
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Underwater Rugby
– Germany
| What are you
looking at if you see 12 scuba suits chasing each other and a ball? In the pursuit of
fresh games man has invented many sports – and here’s Underwater Rugby. Borrow a
ball from the friendly neighbourhood water polo club, pump it not with air but saline
water, find a bunch of need-to-stay-in-shape divers, get two wire baskets and good clean
pool, and voila! You’ve got yourself a game. The game was first devised in 1961 at the
German Underwater Club in Cologne. However it wasn’t the Cologne version of the game,
which used to string a net across the middle of the pool which ended a metre from the
bottom so the players could swim through and dunk the ball in the opposing team’s
goal, that goes by the name of Underwater Rugby today. |
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Substantial changes have been made over the years; teams now have 6 playing
members instead of 8, and various rules have been fine-tuned. Underwater Rugby was
recognised by the Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatic (CMAS) in 1978. The
first European Championship was held in 1978 in Malmo, Sweden and the first World
Championship two years later, at Mülheim in the Federal Democratic Republic of Germany.
The game has caught on in a big way as a collegiate sport in the Czech
Republic, in the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, Austria, in the US and of course, it
continues to be popular at the club and college levels in Germany. This May for some cool
subaquatic high jinks plan on being in Mülheim for the Hinkelstein-Turnier Cup beginning
25th.
For more information on Germany, click here.
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Thai
Kickboxing - Bangkok,
Thailand
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Muay Thai,
that’s the name of the game, which the CIA and the US Seals and the Thai Royal Army
play when they don’t quite like what you’re up to! No, actually, Thai Kickboxing
is not an offence but a self-defence art. Thai children begin to pick it up when
they’ve just about begun to learn how to balance. From 4 years of age a major number
of these kids enrol at Kickboxing schools in affirmation of cultural traditions. |
Unlike Tae Kwon
Do and Karate where students earn belts for every new grade that they achieve, Muay Thai
does not award any grades. The reward is earned in the ring, in a real fight at a real
tournament; that’s what separates the truly dedicated, truly disciplined, truly
dexterous from the casual practitioner.
Muay Thai does
not include ground grappling techniques but relies on the deadly and accurate use of
fists, knees, elbows and kicks. Of course, you can catch a Kickboxing match anywhere now
– from the Netherlands to Brazil – but for the real McCoy you’ll have to
wend your way through Bangkok’s busy streets to the Lumpini Stadium (Tuesday, Friday,
Saturday) or the Ratchadamnoen ring (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday). Place your
bet and get swept up in the wave of spectator enthusiasm.
For more information on Bangkok, click here.
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Kite Flying
Festival – Ahmedabad, India
| Every year in
January the skies of India come alive with innumerable fluttering kites of every colour
imaginable. In India the point about kite flying is not the beauty and the construction of
the kite but the dexterity of the handler. Patang-baazi (the fight of kites) is as
much a competitive sport as cricket. The effort of the guy handling the kite (whether the
kite is in the shape of an exotic bird or a simple rhombus with a triangular tail is
largely immaterial) is directed towards getting as many other kites down as possible. And
how is this accomplished? Quite simply by using the string of the kite to cut the string of another: the
spool of string that anchors the kite is, in India and all over the subcontinent, coated
with glass dust and if one isn’t careful liable to cut ones fingers. |
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Every winter, when it’s cool and breezy, countless kids and adults
congregate on roofs of houses or in open fields and the sky becomes a riot of colours. The
season reaches its peak in the mid-January festival of Makar Sankranti.
It is in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, western India, that a fitting
tribute to this sport is organised. The International Kite Festival is held annually on
the 14th of January at either the Sardar Patel Stadium or the Police Stadium in
Ahmedabad. While the entire city is up and about from dawn engaged in the sport,
kite-flyers from around the world assemble at the stadium to show off their kites, some
beautiful, some ingenious, some containing social messages but all exotic. As dusk falls
special illuminated kites called tukal are launched as a grand finale to the
festival and the kite-flying season.
So if you have a kite that’s in any way unusual, whether it’s of
paper of fibreglass, make sure you are in Ahmedabad to participate at the event.
For more information on Ahmedabad, click
here.
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Elephant
Polo – Royal Chitwan National Park, Nepal
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Come December and
it gets wonderfully pleasant in the terai. The terai are the lush green
plains that lie just before the Himalayan foothills. Blessed with plenty of rainfall and a
subtropical climate, this area used to be a densely forested paradise where elephants,
tigers, rhino and langur roamed free, where the branches of trees would house
innumerable avian species and the rivers were teeming with crocodiles and mahseer. Today
the Mahendra Rajmarg or the East-West highway wends its way through the terai, and
it is no longer virgin jungle. Just as well perhaps, because then you’d miss the
Elephant Polo! |
If “polo” brings to mind shiny-coated horses and the swift pursuit
of a polo ball, here’s your rethink. In early December at the Chitwan National Park
in Nepal’s southeastern plains the World Elephant Polo Association holds the annual
WEPA tournament at an airfield in Meghauli on the park’s northern boundary.
It’s a four a-side event: four elephants each side prompted by four mahouts
behind whom the players are perched, mallet in hand. The ball used is the standard polo
ball, which the players must hit over the other side’s goal line. There are two
10-minute chukkers separated by a 15-minute break after which the teams change
sides. Those are the basics; for the finer points, pop in at Chitwan for the games this
December and follow it up with a stay at the sanctuary. There are few nicer ways to cheat
the winter chill!
For more information on Royal Chitwan National Park,
click here.
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Hawaiki
Nui Va’a – French Polynesia
| Every October the
open seas around the Pacific islands of French Polynesia come alive with ripples.
That’s when a huge number of carefully constructed canoes take to the waters,
propelled by the rippling muscular action of deliciously bronze men, as they make their
way through the blue (oh! so blue) waters from Huahine to Bora Bora. |
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The canoe in this case is the traditional vessel of these islands, not an
inflatable rubber tube but a hollowed out log that’s been in use for centuries.
Called the wa’a in Hawaii and known as the waka ama in New Zealand, va’a
is the Tahitian name for this kind of craft.
The 130 km race consists of three legs: from Huahine to Raiatea, from Raiatea to
Tahaa, and finally from Tahaa to Bora Bora. You can catch it at any point but if
you’re in it not just for the finer points of canoe racing, try to catch the end at
Pointe Matira, Bora Bora. Because that’s where you can catch the bringue,
traditional Polynesian partying that’s guaranteed to be very, very merry!
For more information on French Polynesia, click
here.
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Land up at a complex where 6
grown up guys are waiting outside a net while two guys inside with baskets on their hands
are hurling (or lunging for) one very hard ball and you know you’re at a jai alai
fronton.
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Jai alai is usually played by 8 people, two being on the court at any point
while 6 others wait their turn in the round robin. Of the two on court one is a server and
the other the receiver. It works like squash in that the ball (pelota) is hurled at
the front wall; for it to count as a valid serve it must fall in a certain area on its
rebound. The trick is to impart such spin and force to the ball that the receiver
doesn’t have a hope of getting to it. The receiver has to catch the ball either on
the fly or on the first bounce. If that happens then the point goes to him and the server
walks off the court and joins at the end of the queue outside. The one who is first in the
queue then comes in to play. This carries on till everybody has played everybody. Whoever
gets to 7 points first (or 9 in a Superfecta game) is declared the winner, the one with
the second highest score gets a “place” and the one who comes third is said to
have got a “show”. Tied scores are decided with playoffs. |
Jai alai
originated in the Basque region of Spain with a couple of guys chucking a ball against the
local church wall. The game caught on and was soon a major attraction at local fairs and
festivals. It spread to America where it’s still a rage and Mexico where you just
have to enter Tijuana to see the enthusiasm it can generate.
The jai alai
ball, called pelota, is the hardest ball used in any sport, so hard in fact that
only granite will not crack under its impact. (The three walls of the playing area are of
granite.) The basket, which is tied to the players’ arms, is called cesta. A
player uses a cesta to catch and throw the pelota. The cesta is made
from reeds found exclusively in the Pyrenees Mountains, which are woven and mounted on a
frame that is made of steam-bent Chestnut. It is hand woven specifically for each player.
The pelota is roughly 3/4 the size of a baseball; its core consists of Brazilian
virgin de pola rubber, layered with nylon and hand-stitched with two goatskin covers. The
court is traditionally called a cancha.
In
Mexico’s Tijuana, the most important jai alai fronton is the Fronton Palacio.
It’s on the city’s main drag, the Revolucion Avenue. Exhibition tournaments are
held through the year on weekends. So if you are going to Tijuana, make sure it’s on
a Friday. Get to the Palacio by 7 in the evening, in time for the first game, and
you’ll find yourself there the rest of that evening and the next. The lightning fast
pace of jai alai takes the sport from being sport to grand entertainment – what sport
was always meant to be!
For more information on Mexico, click here.
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Capoeira
- Brazil
| Going way back to the 1500s and the
time when African slaves were imported to South America by the Portuguese, Capoeira is not
your regular martial arts sport. For one it's precise origins are unknown, for another, it
is performed to musical accompaniment. It is thought that the Bantu people devised
Capoeira but one can hardly be sure. One also cannot be sure of how the sport came to be
coupled with musical accompaniment though one theory suggests that this was to disguise it
as a dance when colonial overlords decided to crackdown on the game in the early 19th
century. |
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Today a street performance in Rio
is a tame affair which the onlooker would be eager to catch, attracted by the tune of
berimbaus and tambourines. But there was a time when Capoeira was a notorious combat form
practiced only by hoodlums and gangsters. The martial art got its sophistication in the
days when it was actually a survival technique for the quilombos. In the years of the
mid-17th century, with the Dutch on the rampage and the Portuguese on the back foot, many
slaves took advantage of the confusion and escaped from the plantations. They made their
way into the interiors and there set up quilombos or communities, and became fully
functional socio-economic and political units. Needless to say, it wasn't long before the
colonisers had made inroads into the difficult Brazilian forest. Threatened by the
prospect of enslavement again, the quilombos needed to develop Capoeira as an effective
self-defence technique.
In its long history this martial art form has had quite a chequered career, having been
banned and restored to respectability about half a dozen times. At present it's in a very
respectable phase and likely to remain so with the capoeiristas having dumped their
switchblades and daggers for gentler accessories like the berimbau, pandiero, atabaque and
agogo. The single-stringed bow-like berimbau is accompanied by tambourines, congo drums
and bells to provide the background score and the set the tone for the encounter.
To begin with all participants, musicians included, stand around in a circle. The music
begins first following which participants enter the circle in twos. Capoeiristas are
probably the most graceful martial arts practitioners of the lot. Capoeira demands
gymnastic ability, mental stability and physical strength. The inimitable fluid ritualised
movements of the sport, sometimes more like a dance than a fight, make Capoeira a popular
game all over Brazil in all its forms. The two major forms are Angola and Regional. The
movements of the former are executed closer to the ground in a slow even pace, while the
latter is a faster deadlier version. You can tell by casual observation which kind of game
is in progress: players of Angola dress in yellow and black, and squat in a circle while
players of Regional (pronounced hey-zio-naal) wear white, stand in a circle and clap to
the rhythm of the music.
Capoeira has been declared the national game of Brazil but such is the popularity of the
game that you might even chance upon it on the golden sands of Bondi Beach. For the real
stuff of course, there's no place like a street or a Capoeira school in Recife, Rio or Sao
Paulo. This is where the spirits of Mestre Pastinha and Mestre Bimba, the granddaddies of
the game, live on, this is where Capoeira should be enjoyed.
For more information on Brazil, click here.
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