The world is a very strange place, and the extreme sports world is a whole lot stranger. Here, people seem to go out of their way to invent odd ways of having a good time while risking their necks. There are plenty of candidates for the ‘Weirdest Extreme Sport‘ award. Here are just five of the possibilities.
(1) Elephant Polo
It’s polo, but instead of ponies, the riders are mounted on elephants. They use specially elongated polo sticks and each elephant carries two players. One steers while the other is responsible for hitting a standard polo ball towards the opposing goal. This may sound like a once-off crazy idea, but it’s not. Matches are regularly played in four countries and rules are laid down by the World Elephant Polo Association. Unfortunately, nobody told the elephants, and in 2007 an attack of bad sportsmanship saw two players injured and one team minibus destroyed. Spectators are advised to stand well back from the goal.
The World’s Weirdest Extreme Sports is a guest post for IC by Jess Spate who is a rock climber an extreme sports enthusiast, although she is yet to snowboard down an active volcano or take part in an elephant polo match. She works for Appalachian Outdoors, an American outdoor shop selling everything from Life is Good clothing to ski touring accessories. She also edits a UK-based rock climbing website. If you wish to write for us too, check the guest blogging requirements here.
(2). Ironing
The extreme ironing fraternity is a diverse one. Born out of a challenge issued to all outdoor sportspeople, extreme ironers compete to see who can take their boards and irons to the strangest and most difficult places. The craze spread across the globe like wildfire, and so far shirts have been ironed (with varying degrees of success) on mountaintops, in deep caves, suspended from ropes across gaping chasms, and underwater with aid of scuba diving equipment.
(3) Base Solo Climbing
Solo rock climbing is a dangerous sport. There is no rope and nobody to catch you if you fall. For the very small number of rock climbers that choose to get involved in solo climbing the philosophy is simple- don’t fall off or you’ll die. However, solo climbing has recently been married with BASE jumping (the art of leaping off a building, bridge, or mountain with a parachute) to create something new. The aim is to climb a rock face carrying a parachute. If you succeed, you jump off the top. If you don’t, you try very, very hard to get the parachute deployed before hitting the ground.
(4) Volcano Boarding
It takes a special kind of snowboarder to look at a pristine snow slope and imagine it might be better with more lava. These folks are volcano boarders. They launch themselves down the dry debris slopes left by recent volcanic eruptions on special heavy-duty boards. As you can imagine, boarding on the rocks is a lot less forgiving than boarding on nice powdery snow, so pads and helmets are the order of the day but even those won’t protect the wearers from the other danger- that of another volcanic eruption.
(5) Wingsuiting
Remember wearing a towel as a cape and jumping off the sofa pretending you could fly like superman as a five-year-old? Wingsuit pilots never let go of the idea. They jump out of planes or off clifftops in ‘squirrel suits’ that will let them glide for a little while, then deploy a parachute to land. It may sound crazy but wingsuiters have made distances of more than three horizontal miles.
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