Suction Cup Tug of War – A Bald Man’s Sport

The Japanese town of Tsuruta is famous for hosting a unique annual competition – a popular game of tug of war in which bald men attach suction cups to their heads and pull in opposite directions.

The Covid-19 pandemic threw a wrench in all aspects of Japanese society, but it’s fair to say that social gatherings and events were among the most impacted. Tsuruta, a town in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, recently held its annual “Suction Cup Tug-of-War” tournament for the first time in three years, and it was just as fun as people remembered. Thought up by the Tsuruta Hagemasu Association as a way of shedding a positive light on baldness, suction cup tug-of-war is a fun game in which two people sitting opposite from each other attach suction cups connected through a string to their heads and pull. The person whose suction cup detaches first loses.

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SpoGomi – How Japan Turned Collecting Trash Into a Competitive Sport

SpoGomi, a combination of ‘sport’ and ‘gomi’ (Japanese for rubbish) is a popular competition in which teams of 3-5 people try to pick up the most trash of the highest quality in a set period of time.

Japan recently announced that it would host the first SpoGomi World Cup in November of 2023, with teams from all over the world scouring the streets of Tokyo in search of trash to pick up. Each team of three players will have 60 minutes to gather the most trash from a designated area while trying to sort it correctly into color-coded bags for each type (burnable waste, recyclable plastic, metal cans, etc.). When the time is up, the trash will be weighted and checked for proper sorting, and the team with the most trash wins. In case of a tie, the winner is determined by the quality of the trash, with points awarded by type (cigarette butts win the most points).

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People Can’t Believe This Mature-Looking Football Player Is Only 12 Years Old

The internet is struggling to come to terms with the fact that Jeremiah Johnson, a running back from Fort Worth, Texas is only 12 years old despite his mature appearance.

Jeremiah Johnson started making news headlines around the country last week, after photos of him holding the trophy for ’12U Division 1 Most Valuable Player’ went viral on social media. Johnson’s team, the Dallas Dragons Elite Academy (DEA), had just won the 2022 Youth National Championships in Miami, and he was crowned MVP. But while his photos got thousands of likes and congratulatory comments, what most people seemed to be focused on was Jeremiah’s age. They just couldn’t believe that he was only 12 years old, and to be fair, the boy did look incredibly mature for his age.

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Hansel Enmanuel – The One-Armed Point Guard Making Waves in College Basketball

Hansel Enmanuel lost his left arm when he was only a child, but that didn’t stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional basketball player.

19-year-old Hansel became an online sensation last year when a highlight video of his high-school basketball exploits went viral. People love underdog success stories, and Hansel Enmanuel’s is particularly special. He was only six when a pile of cinder blocks fell on him, crushing his left arm so badly that doctors had no choice but to amputate it below the shoulder. It was a devastating blow to Hansel and his family, but it only made him work harder in order to fulfill his dream of playing basketball at a professional level.

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Motorcycle Chariot Racing – An Exhilarating Mix of ‘Ben Hur’ and ‘Mad Max’

Motorcycle chariot racing is a modern take on one of the most popular sports in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire.

We’ve featured our fair share of unusual sports here on Oddity Central, but motorcycle chariot racing is undoubtedly one of our most unique entries. Replacing the horses of old with some real horsepower in the form of two motorcycles, this unusual sport is making a comeback in the Land Down Under. Originally invented in the early 1900s in Australia, motorcycle chariot racing eventually spread to Europe and the USA before gradually being banned because of the danger to the riders. However, the adrenaline-fueled sport is currently making a comeback in Australia, thanks to a professional stunt rider.

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World’s Smallest Football League Consists of Only Two Teams

The Isles of Scilly Football League is the world’s smallest official football league, consisting of only two teams that play each other seventeen times a season.

As the home of football, England has always been crazy about the team sport, and the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago of more than 140 islands off the southwestern tip of Cornwall, is no exception. Like many other regions of England, the isles have their own football league, but what sets them apart is the size of the league – it consists of just two teams, the Garrison Gunners and the Woolpack Wanderers, that play each other every weekend during a season, as well as in two yearly cups and the traditional ‘Old Men versus the Youngsters’ game played on Boxing Day.

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The COPD Athlete – Man Runs Marathons With Only 30 Percent Lung Capacity

An Australian man has become known as the COPD Athlete because of his incredible ability to run entire marathons despite having only 30 percent lung capacity as a result of an incurable and progressive condition.

Russell Winwood was diagnosed with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) in 2011. By that time, the Brisbane native had already turned his life around, having survived a stroke at age 36. He had given up smoking, cut down on drinking alcohol, started eating better, and, most importantly, he had taken up sports. For years, he competed in varying distances of triathlons, from sprint to Half Ironman and even a few ultra-marathons. Everything was going great, but at one point Winwood noticed that his usual training felt harder and he found it difficult to breathe. That’s when he received his COPD diagnosis, along with the warning that his lungs were operating at less than 30 percent capacity.

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Armboxing – Probably the World’s Weirdest Contact Sport

The world of contact sports is about to be taken by storm by one of the craziest creations in human history – armboxing, a weird take on the art of boxing.

The world is full of weird and wacky sports, but when it comes to downright crazy inventions, the Russians definitely take the cake. After the insanity that was ‘car-jitsu’ – basically jiu jitsu in a car – the brilliant minds in Mother Russia have come up with something even more insane. Known only as ‘armboxing’, this new contact sport sees two fighters standing opposite each other being chained to a podium with their lead hands glued together and the other hand free to do damage.

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Meet the Footballer Who Once Brought Down a Plane With a Football Shot

Roberto Gabriel Trigo, are tired football player from Paraguay, is probably the only man alive who can say that he shot down a small plane with a football.

The legend of the football kick that brought down a plane has been doing the rounds through the locker rooms of Paraguayan football clubs for six decades. Some say it happened during an official game, others that it was during a practice, but they all credit the same man – Roberto Gabriel Trigo. He was 17 years old at the time and playing as a right back for the now-defunct General Genes football club of Asuncion. Annoyed by a small plane flying low over the local football field, Trigo allegedly kicked the ball outwards, hitting the aircraft’s engine and causing it to crash in an open field, just 200 meters away.

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Extreme Alpine Football Is Only Played on the Steepest Mountain Slopes

As the name suggests, alpine football is a variation of the world’s most popular competitive sport that is played on steep mountain slopes in order to make it more difficult.

Most competitive sports usually take place on level playing fields, but in the case of alpine football, one of the main conditions is that the pitch must be steep. It sounds downright impossible, but a group of football fans in the Austrian Alps claims that it’s the ultimate way to play their favorite sport. They came up with the idea for extreme alpine football during the 2014 World Cup, while watching a boring game and brainstorming for ways to spice it up a bit.

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Car-jitsu – The Goofy Contact Sport Only Practiced in Cars

In case the name ‘car-jitsu’ wasn’t clear enough, this new contact sport that’s getting a lot of attention on Russian social media is basically jiu-jitsu in a car.

If you were to make a list of the most awkward places to grapple and wrestle in, the car would probably rank pretty high, and that’s precisely what makes car-jitsu so intriguing. Invented a couple of years ago by Vikentiy Mikheev, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Judo black belt and a professional mixed martial arts fighter, car-jitsu challenges practitioners to subdue their opponent in the small confines of a car. Everything inside the car – including the seat belts, steering wheel, mirrors and chairs – can be used to gain an upper hand in the match, but, just like in regular jiu-jitsu, hittinh is not allowed.

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New Contact Sport Promises the Most Exciting Part of Hockey Minus the Hockey

If you’re of the opinion that fights are the most exciting part of ice hockey, you’re probably going to love Ice Wars, a new combat sports league that pits ice hockey enforcers against each other.

Take away the sticks, the puck and the nets, and you’re left with hockey players with nothing better to do than beat each other to a pulp for the entertainment of paying spectators. That’s essentially the idea behind Ice Wars, a soon-to-debut combat sports league featuring ice hockey enforcers fighting for money. A match will consist of two, one-minute rounds with a 30-second “ice breaker” round in the event that the fighters each win one round.

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The Unbelievable Story of Carlos Kaiser, the Greatest Conman in Football History

Carlos Henrique Raposo, aka Carlos Kaiser, is a Brazilian former football player known primarily for having a decade-long career without actually playing a single game.

As children, most people grow up dreaming of one day becoming sports champions, despite an obvious lack of athletic abilities. Most of us realize this to be nothing more than an impossible dream and move on, but a few still manage to find ways of making their goal a reality, by any means necessary. This is the story of Carlos Henrique Raposo, a Brazilian athlete who “wanted to be a footballer, but did not want to play football”. Believe it or not, he managed to be just, playing for top-ranked Brazilian and international clubs for over a decade. ‘Playing’ may not be the right word, though, as he never actually played an official game in his entire 12-year-long career.

Carlos Kaiser – nicknamed earned due to his alleged resemblance to German football legend Franz Beckenbauer – always knew that he had the physique of a professional football player, but not the necessary talent and skills to make the roster of top football clubs, so he relied on a variety of tricks to build himself up as this great player that every team was after.

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Iranian Women’s Football Team Accused of Using a Man as a Goalkeeper

Following a penalty shootout to their Iranian rivals in a women’s football match, Jordanian officials have called on the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) to launch an investigation to determine the sex of the Iranian team’s goalkeeper.

On September 25, following a goalless draw, the Iranian and Jordanian women’s football teams went to a penalty shootout to determine who would qualify to the 2022 Women’s Asian Cup. The Jordanians were heavy favorites to win the game, but the opposing goalkeeper had other plans. Zohreh Koudae saved two penalties, securing her team’s 4-2 shootout victory, and the national team’s first-ever appearance at the Women’s Asian Cup. Only the story doesn’t end here. Jordanian officials have since called on the Asian Football Confederation to investigate whether the Iranian goalkeeper is actually a woman.

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Japan’s Unique Hole-in-One Golf Insurance Policy

Hitting a hole-in-one is one of the greatest things that can happen to a golf player, but in Japan, such a lucky shot can lead to such an expensive celebration that insurers actually sell hole-in-one insurance policies to mitigate the ‘risk’.

The average golfer has 1 in 12,500 chances of hitting a hole-in-one, while professional golf players have a 1in 2,500 chance of making the shot. Those are not particularly great odds, but they’re high enough to prompt many Japanese golfers to take hole-in-one insurance policies. You see, in the Asian country, it’s customary for whoever makes this incredibly lucky shot to through a celebratory party that can cost up to $10,000. That’s more expensive than most people want to pay, so in order to cut costs, many golfers take out special insurance policies for a few tens of dollars a year, just in case they get lucky.

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