Funny sports that make news from across the world
Professional sports are associated mostly with a lot of seriousness and competitiveness. Winning and losing can be called the major determinants of any sport with all athletes vying for the winners spot. Not only do professional sports demand commitment and organization they are also categorized by their highly organized and skill driven nature. Sportsmen are expected to represent the spirit of sportsmanship by being respectful of their competitors and of the sporting officials thereby reflecting the true nature of the sport being played.
However, this focused and serious world of professional sports is also a cauldron of several funny incidents as well bringing making these haloed sports celebrities a lot more real. There have been a number of occasions where athletes or sports celebrities have been found saying dumb quotes that are enough to fill you with your required dose of daily laughter each day. One does often wonder how does a mind that is so channelized, so focused and so talented come up with something that is amazingly and so utterly dumb!
Simultaneously there are some very funny sports contests that take place across the world. These bizarre activities can range from a wife carrying competition for the prize of beer to duck racing to the world coal carrying championships. The wife carrying championship is an annual event held in Finland in the month of July. The winner has to cover a number of obstacles over land and water to win this event for the prize of a new mobile phone and beer for the amount of the wife’s weight!
Strangely enough, these funny sports have their set of rules as well. In case of the wife carrying competition, the wife must be older than 17 years and must weigh over 49kgs. Dropping the wife or bouncing the wife does include a fine and having fun tops the charts! Funny set of rules…
In Tasmania, the yearly apple race is organized around the month of October each year. People actually gather together to watch apples race down from the bridge at Hounville into the Houn river.
One of the craziest local sporting events could be the ‘running of the bulls’, held annually in Pamplona in Spain. The chase lasts nearly a kilometer with people running ahead of a chasing bull through the Pamplona’s narrow, winding lanes. This dangerous and crazy events attracts a huge crowd to this region each year and a number of participants do get seriously injured and sometimes killed while participating in this game.
Everyone has heard of duck racing. But a rubber duck race that raises $1 million for the aid of local charities? The Singapore Duck race is one such crazy annual event that involves 85,000 rubber ducks contesting against one another across the Singapore river. These ducks are first ‘adopted’ by people and then thrown into the water. The first duck to go downstream is considered the winner. Duck races also take place in Britain. The Great British Duck Race is one such event in Britain that takes place on the Thames River. The 2007 event smashed the Singapore Duck Race record by racing 165,000 ducks across the River Thames.
Though these events are featured mostly in the local news, it is their popularity and simplicity that has made most of these funny sports famous and noteworthy. At some level, it is perhaps, easier to get a good laugh from seeing a silly event like apple racing than taking notice of and following the supposedly funny drunken brawls of famous sports celebrities that makes sports headlines.