20 Strangest Competitions From History

I love a good wheel of cheese, but if it means running after it, I’m going to skip this event. However, some people in Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester disagree with me. Every year, sane looking people roll down a dangerously steep hill in order to win a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese. The cheese gets a one-second head start and a velocity of approximately 70 mph. So getting the cheese is not even necessary for winning the event. Just chasing the wheel will do. The winner gets the wheel of cheese, plus a few bruises to remind him or her of the experience.

The Wife Carrying World Championships, held in the Finnish town of Sonkajärvi since 1992, has a pretty obvious rule: you have to carry a woman during the race. However, that woman does not have to be your wife; she just has to be at least 49 kilos and be ready to hang upside down across your back (the so-called Estonian hold). And the winner takes home the carried partner’s weight in beer. Which is nice, but of course you need to be careful how much you carry…

Put on a snorkel and lose all shame, because the World Bog Snorkeling Championships require you to swim two laps through a dark, muddy bog in Wales. You aren’t allowed to use normal swimming motions, just your flippers while your head stays submerged in bog-water the consistency and shade of iced tea that hasn’t been stirred in ages.

Arm wrestling is well-known. Now imagine you move the whole thing roughly five feet south and you have toe wrestling. It was invented in the 1970s by four bored drinkers (shock!) at Ye Olde Royal Oak Inn in the Staffordshire village of Wetton. And now there is an international tournament. The players lock big toes and try to pin their opponent’s foot down for three seconds in a ring dubbed, you guessed it, the Toedium.

Pulling cute little worms out of the ground may not seem like the most frightening of superpowers, but the World Worm Charming Championship takes the competition quite seriously. Contestants have a 3m x 3m plot and 30 minutes to pull as many earthworms out of the dirt as they can, with some resorting to tactics such as sticking pitchforks into the soil. The event has run since 1980, and the record is still held by 10-year-old Sophie Smith, who managed to charm up an astonishing 567 worms in 2009.

Brains and brawn do not normally meet in the same arena. But chess boxing does. The first time I heard the word “chess boxing” I imagined you could knock out board pieces by throwing other pieces against the same squares, but no. You have to play speed chess one round and punch each other the next round, until you get checkmated or knocked out. Chess boxing was created by the Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh as a piece of performance art; he held the first “real” fight in Berlin in 2003. As Bobby Fischer put it, “chess is war over the board.” In chess boxing, it is literal.

Extreme ironing, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, is the marriage of extreme sports and doing laundry. While I’m not aware of any adrenaline rush involved in ironing your pants, that’s just my opinion! The invention of Extreme Ironing is credited to Englishman Phil Shaw in 1997 when he decided that climbing a mountain was a more exciting way to get around his backlog of ironing. Since then, people have been ironing their clothes underwater, on cliffs, while snowboarding, and while skydiving. With no official competition or organization, pretty much anyone can be champion of the world! That could never be me.

All the World Gurning Championship wants from you is to make the nastiest face you possibly can. The event takes place during the annual Egremont Crab Fair in Cumbria, England, which received its royal charter from King Henry III in 1267. Gurning contests at the fair have been recorded since at least 1852, making it one of the oldest contests on our list. This one I can get behind, just feed me some stinky food and let’s get this over with.

Now, if you think standing perfectly still as thousands of bees crawl over your naked body is the stuff of nightmares, rest assured that most people feel the same way and this Chinese contest has relatively few participants. The competitors only wear shorts, secure a queen bee in place, and await the arrival of the queen’s swarm to form a living suit of buzzing insects. The American beekeeper Mark Biancaniello held the former world record at 39.5 kilograms in 1998; however, the current Guinness World Record is held by Chinese beekeeper Gao Bingguo, who was draped in 109 kilograms (or 1.1 million bees) in 2015. I say we leave the beekeepers alone on this one.

Perhaps the most infamous, Russia’s Bubble Baba Challenge might be the only event in history where your flotation device is an inflatable doll. Competitors rode them through rapids and it looked as strange as it sounds. It was held from 2003 until 2012 when the Russian authorities shut it down, citing high water levels and construction concerns.

At the World Sauna Championships in Heinola, Finland, contestants were placed in a sauna that reached temperatures exceeding 100°C, with water poured on the heating rocks every 30 seconds to intensify the steam. The last contestant remaining standing was declared the winner, provided they could leave the sauna without aid. The competition was discontinued in 2010 after a participant died during the finals.

Shovel racing originated in New Mexico in the 1970s, and was created by ski lift workers who found that the quickest route downhill was to drop onto a snow shovel and let momentum take over. You sit in the scoop, with the handle pointing forward, and race downhill at terrifyingly high speeds. Sounds like fun, but extremely risky!

In Nanaimo, British Columbia, they made their tub go the distance. Since 1967, townspeople have powered up bathtubs and raced them across the harbor. The driving force behind it was the local mayor Frank Ney, a flamboyant character who championed the unusual event and helped establish it as one of Nanaimo’s annual staples.

In January every year, the town of Port Lincoln in Australia celebrates the noble art of throwing a frozen tuna as far as you can. The festival, called Tunarama, had competitors throw real tuna for many years, but since 2008 they’ve thrown a weighted fake instead, which is perhaps even more bizarre.

Before bungee jumping was invented and padded with safety wires and crash pads, the men of Pentecost Island, Vanuatu jumped from wooden platforms up to 100 feet in the air with only tree vines tied around their ankles. The vines are carefully measured so that the jumper’s head barely touches the earth, leaving little room for error. For the boys, it’s a rite of passage; for everyone else, it’s believed to bring a good yam harvest.

It’s fun to laugh about the prospect of competitive face slapping until you realize Power Slap features two massive men standing on opposite sides of a table, taking turns landing open-palmed strikes on one another in the face, without dodging or flinching. And the most wholesome aspect is that these brutal exchanges usually finish with the fighters embracing each other like nothing happened. If anyone hit me that hard, even for a sport, I don’t think I could look at them again, so this is just something I’ll enjoy watching for now! (Not that I’m a massive man, of course.)

Americans adapted this medieval siege engine as a means of launching pumpkins. Punkin Chunkin is essentially a competition to see who can throw a pumpkin the longest distance. While the original method was a trebuchet, there have now been large-scale catapults and even air cannons used that can send a pumpkin over a mile away. It would only take “zombies” to appear and it could finally become a real-life version of Plants vs. Zombies.

Japan is famous for being orderly and polite. And yet bo-taoshi, played every November at the National Defense Academy, is anything but orderly. Like capture the flag on steroids, 75 members of one team try to pull down a very tall flagpole while 75 others try to defend it. The pole has to be tilted more than 30 degrees to win. I thought the capture the flag in Percy Jackson was wild, but after watching this, I’m not sure what’s more chaotic.

The ear pull takes tug of war to a new level of pain endurance at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics in Alaska. A loop of sinew is hooked behind one ear of each opponent, and then they lean back and pull until one gives way from the pain. I don’t know how much pain that is, but you’d need incredible lobe strength to even participate in this sport!

Cricket fighting is one of the most ancient of these pastimes, going back more than 1,000 years in China. Captors lure the boldest crickets from the countryside and place them in small cages to face off against each other, provoking them by stroking their heads with a fine blade of grass.

This content was created with the help of AI.