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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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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Every year, dozens of teams from all over Japan travel to the Japanese town of Ito to compete in one of the world’s most unique sporting events – All-Japan Pillow Fighting Championships.

Pillow fighting is an age-old pastime practiced by children of all ages all over the world. Japan is no different, only here the game has been elevated to the status of national sport, with teams made up of people of all ages competing against each other for fame and fortune. After first battling it out in regional qualifying events, winning teams meet up in the small fishing town of Ito, south of Tokyo, to compete in the All-Japan Pillow Fighting Championships, for the title of Japan’s best pillow fighters.

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Zhang Ziyu, a 14-year-old basketball player from Shandong, China, has been getting a lot of attention because of her unusual height, 7ft 5in (2.26m), and getting compared to Chinese basketball legend Yao Ming.

In photos and videos that have been doing the rounds online for the past week, Zhang Ziyu can be seen towering over both teammates and opponents during an under-15s tournament in Jingzhou, where she just happened to score 42 points in a game, as well as 25 rebounds and six blocks. Chinese media reported that Zhang’s parents were both professional basketball players, but still, her stature is surprising, especially considering her age.  She is already  taller than both her father (6ft 11in/2.13m) and her mother (6ft 6in/1.98m).

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Rory van Ulft, a 7-year-old Canadian gymnast, has been raising eyebrows with her weightlifting achievements, recently becoming the youngest under-11 and under-13s US Youth National Champion in history.

Rory took up weightlifting about two years ago, as a way of becoming stronger. She had started doing gymnastics but learned that she could get injured doing certain things, if she wasn’t strong enough. She started lifting weights in the the snatch and the clean and jerk styles, under the careful supervision of a trainer, and gradually developed her strength to the point that she now lifts weights that some adults would probably struggle with. She can snatch 32kg, clean and jerk 42kg, as well as squat 61kg, and deadlift 80kg using an Olympic women’s bar.

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All Kabaddi World is a popular Facebook channel that popularized a bombastic, over-the-top version of the ancient wrestling art of kabaddi. It’s basically a Pakistani version of World Wrestling Entertainment.

The first time I watched a clip posted by All Kabaddi World, I was confused yet enthralled by these two topless men that seemed to chase each other around a dirt ring while slapping the hell out of each other. They were slapping each other on the cheeks, the chest, their bellies, all to the cheers of a huge crowd. Every once in a while one of them got thrown to the ground and fell in a really exaggerated manner that explained the “wwe” in the Pakistani title I didn’t understand. This was a really unique, yet strangely-entertaining take on American wrestling.

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There are some long golf courses out there, some covering over 8,000 yards, but they all seem tiny when compared to the world’s longest golf course, which spans a whopping 1,365 kilometers.

Nullabor Links is an 8-hole par-72 golf course that stretches along the Eyre Highway, from Kalgoorlie in Western Australia to Ceduna in South Australia. Legend has it that the course was created to give truck drivers something to do on this remote stretch of road, but according to several sources, it was just a wacky idea born over a few bottles of wine between two golf enthusiasts looking for a way to keep tourists along Eyre Highway in the area for longer. Their concept, to create the world’s longest golf course proved a huge hit, one that continues to grow in popularity.

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Sports are usually associated with skill and effort, be they physical or mental, but in Vinkensport or vinkenzetting (literally ‘Finch Sitting), a traditional animal sport practiced in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, it’s all about sitting down and listening to birds singing.

In Vinkensport, small cages are lined up in a row about six feet apart on the street. Inside each box is a single male chaffinch whose job is to produce as many bird calls as possible in one hour. Sitting in front of the wooden cages are their owners, the vinkeniers (“finchers”) who tally the bird songs with chalk on a large wooden rod. Each chalk line represents one complete bird call which ends in a characteristic flourish known as a susk-e-wiet. Judges walk along the row of cages to make sure no one cheats. The chaffinch with the most bird calls in an hour is declared the winner. Vinkensport is a very passive sport, some would even call it boring, but it is also a very controversial one.

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Board shoe racing is the traditional sport of the Zhuang people of China’s Gunaxi province, a unique discipline that has three people sharing the same “shoes”, which requires perfect coordination and concentration.

Board shoe racing can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty, when legend has it that a famous heroine of the Xhuang people used it as a way to train soldiers against invading Japanese pirates. The legendary Mrs. Wa used long pieces of wood to teach the men to march together in perfect synchronization, which greatly improved their combat qualities and boosted their fighting spirit, helping them repel the invaders. The traditional sport has been passed on from generation to generation since then.

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Man vs Fat is a weight-loss phenomenon sweeping the United Kingdom and helping soccer fans lose weight and improve their fitness by getting involved in their favorite sport.

Soccer, or football, as we Europeans call it, is the most popular sport in the world, but nowhere is it more loved than in its birthplace – England. To say people there are crazy about soccer would be an understatement; with over 140 individual leagues, containing more than 480 divisions, and around 7,000 professional clubs, it’s safe to say that soccer truly is at home in England. People love to play it, love to watch others playing it, either in stadiums or from the comfort of their own homes, love to talk about it in pubs, it’s just a big part of daily life. So I guess it makes sense that soccer be so effective in helping to curb the country’s very serious obesity problem.

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American basketball player Donell “D.J.” Cooper has been banned from the sport for two years after a urine test found him to be pregnant.

The 28-year-old point guard who last played for AS Monaco, in Europe, was suspended for two years by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) after a urine sample was found to contain high levels of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG)—a hormone produced by the female placenta during pregnancy. Instead of praising the finding as a divine miracle, FIBA assumed that Cooper had submitted a woman’s urine as his own, without knowing that she was pregnant at the time, so they banned him from playing competitively for two years.

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Most people struggle to solve a 3×3 Rubik’s cube with their hands, but there are people out there who can do it in under 20 seconds, using only their feet.

You’ve probably heard of people solving Rubik’s cubes blindfolded, using only one hand and even while juggling them; all these different ways of solving the popular puzzle are impressive to watch, but there’s another way of doing it that will probably blow your mind – solving the colorful cube using nothing but your feet. For some reason, I never imagined solving a Rubik’s cube without touching it with your hands was even possible, but it turns out people can do it much faster than the vast majority can using our hands. The current record for the fastest Rubik’s cube solved exclusively with the lower extremity of the legs beneath the ankles is 16.9 seconds.

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Dog weight pulling is an increasingly popular yet highly controversial sport in which dogs of various breeds compete against each other by pulling a trolley loaded with several tons of bricks or concrete blocks 15 feet in less than 60 seconds.

Dog weight pulling has been around for decades, but it has become increasingly controversial in recent years as more and more animal welfare activists started condemning the sport as animal cruelty. The fact that weight pulling is also a known training method for building stamina and making canines more powerful for dog fighting hasn’t exactly helped the reputation of the sport either. Still, dog weight pulling enthusiasts claim that even though some animals end up pulling several dozen times their own weight, the risk of injury is minimized by great conditioning and a genetic predisposition to pulling heavy loads. They also claim that the sport can be beneficial to dogs, as it gives them much needed exercise and strengthens the bond to their owners.

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Copa Ataúdes or Coffin Cup, a yearly futsal tournament hosted by the Peruvian city of Juliaca, has been dubbed the world’s most depressing sports competition for offering coffins as prizes to the three best teams.

The Juliaca Coffin Cup is not your usual futsal tournament. It’s a competition between teams representing the twelve largest funeral houses in the  Puno Region of southeastern Peru, so it kind of makes sense that the main prizes be something representative of the funeral business. Still, fighting your heart out on the pitch for an expensive casket you have to share with five other teammates doesn’t exactly sound worthwhile. That didn’t stop the winning team from parading their $1,300 luxury coffin on their shoulders and singing “Olé, olé, campeon!” at the end of the final match, though.

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The Russian city of Krasknoyask recently hosted the country’s first ever amateur face-slapping championship, which had participants slap each other across the face until one of them got knocked out.

The controversial event was held during the Siberian Power Show, a popular sports show held in Krasnoyarsk on March 16 and 17. A similar competition took place last year, in Moscow, but it featured only professional athletes competing for the unofficial title of most heavy-handed face slapper. This time, organizers decided to give amateurs the chance to prove themselves, so anyone willing to engage in some manly face slapping was invited to sign up. Most of the participants were just random guys who had come to attend the power show and decided to try something new. It’s fair to say that some of them didn’t know the world of pain they would be experiencing at the hands of a mountain of a man…

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