8 Weirdest Sports People Genuinely Compete In

Every spring a wheel of Double Gloucester weighing roughly 4 kg is released down Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire, where it has been clocked at up to 70 mph, and a few hundred people throw themselves down the slope after it. Nobody officially runs this. There is no entry fee and no sanctioning body. Ambulances wait at the bottom.

Cheese rolling is the famous one, and it is also the odd one out, because most genuinely strange sports are governed. They have founding years, written rules, referees with job titles, minimum weights, and disqualification clauses about footwear. Somebody enforces all of it in a wet field with a clipboard. We have covered strange objects plenty. This is strange behaviour, ratified. Without further ado.

1. Bog Snorkelling

Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys has hosted the World Bog Snorkelling Championships since 1985, in a peat bog called Waen Rhydd. You swim two lengths of a water-filled trench cut through the peat, 55 metres each way. Mask, snorkel and flippers only. Recognised swimming strokes are banned outright, so propulsion comes from the legs and nothing else. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest-running bog snorkelling championship anywhere, a phrasing that quietly confirms there are others. Neil Rutter holds the men’s record at 1 min 12.35 sec, set on 27 August 2023. The water is the colour of strong tea. Visibility is nil. A wetsuit is optional and very strongly advised.

2. Shin-Kicking

The Cotswold Olimpick Games started in 1612, dreamed up by a lawyer named Robert Dover who reckoned organised competition would keep the rich and the poor on speaking terms. Four hundred years later the headline event is still two people kicking each other in the legs. Competitors grip each other’s shoulders with straight arms, then aim at the shins until somebody hits the grass. A bout runs three rounds and the most throws wins. Straw is handed out by the organisers as padding. Any metal-reinforced toe on a boot is expressly forbidden. The referee is called the Stickler. At the 2026 games on Dover’s Hill on 29 May, Andrew Bailey took the title after electing to compete with no straw at all.

3. Toe Wrestling

The sport was invented in 1974 at the Royal Oak in Wetton, Staffordshire, by drinkers who wanted a world championship Britain could plausibly win. Two barefoot opponents sit facing one another, lock big toes, and try to force the opposing foot flat against a padded side panel. The apparatus is called the toedium. Feet are inspected in advance for infections and verrucas. Alan “Nasty” Nash won sixteen world titles between 1994 and 2019 by the Guinness count, eight of them in a row. The championship now runs in Ashbourne Market Place, and the 2026 edition on 18 July carried a £9,000 prize fund, with Kasey Brooks and Abigail Beech taking £4,000 each. Four grand goes further than most of what you can spend it on.

4. Wife Carrying

Sonkajärvi in Finland has run the Wife Carrying World Championships since 1992, opening the field to foreign entrants in 1995. The track is 253.5 metres of sand and gravel with two dry obstacles and one water obstacle about a metre deep. The carried partner must weigh at least 49 kg, and anyone lighter straps on a weighted rucksack to make up the shortfall. Backpacks, harnesses, spiked heels and football boots are all banned. Most pairs use the Estonian carry, which hangs the wife upside down on her partner’s back with her legs hooked over his shoulders. Dropping her costs no time penalty. You simply have to pick her up again. The winners go home with the wife’s weight in drink.

5. Worm Charming

Willaston in Cheshire has staged the World Worm Charming Championships since 1980, under rules kept by the International Federation of Charming Worms and Allied Pastimes. Every competitor gets a plot of 3 metres by 3 metres and half an hour. The task is to bring worms up using vibration or music. Digging is prohibited. So is importing worms from elsewhere, a rule that had to come from somewhere. The classic technique is twanging, which means sinking a garden fork into the turf and vibrating it with a stick, though people also bounce footballs, rake and play instruments at the ground. The record is 567 worms, charmed by Sophie Smith on 27 June 2009. She was ten. The mark she broke had stood since before she was born.

6. Chess Boxing

The idea began as a throwaway detail in Enki Bilal’s 1992 graphic novel Froid Équateur, where a chess boxing world championship happens in the background. Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh built the thing for real in Berlin in 2003, then won the first world title in Amsterdam on 14 November that year when Jean-Louis Veenstra ran out of clock. A bout is eleven rounds. Six of chess, five of boxing, three minutes apiece, alternating, opening and closing at the board. Each player carries nine minutes of total chess time with no increment. You can win by knockout, by checkmate, by your opponent’s flag falling, or on points. Chess Boxing Global wants an Elo rating of 1600 and fifty amateur bouts before it will put a fighter on a card, which stops people getting concussed and then asked to defend a Sicilian. It reads like a Monty Python sketch that escaped containment and came back holding a rulebook.

7. Underwater Hockey

In 1954 Alan Blake of the Southsea Sub-Aqua Club needed something to keep his divers occupied through the winter, so he put a game on the bottom of Guildhall Baths in Portsmouth and announced it in the November issue of the club magazine under the name Octopush. Six players from each squad of ten are in the water at any moment, holding their breath, working a short stick in one hand that has to fit inside a box measuring 350 by 100 by 50 mm. The puck is lead and weighs 1.3 to 1.5 kg, because a lighter one would not stay on the floor. Goals are three-metre gulleys at each end. CMAS governs the sport, the first world championship was held in Canada in 1980, and the 2026 age-group worlds go to Gebze in Türkiye.

8. Sepak Takraw

Three players a side, a woven ball, a net at 1.52 metres for men and 1.42 for women, and a court of 13.4 by 6.1 metres. Hands and arms are illegal. Feet, knees, chest and head are all permitted, and a side gets three touches. The ball is rattan or synthetic, 42 to 44 cm around and 170 to 180 grams. The showpiece is the roll spike, a mid-air somersault that lets an attacker strike the ball downward with the sole of the foot from above the height of the net. The International Sepaktakraw Federation was founded in 1988, and Thailand’s King’s Cup is the tournament that carries the most weight. None of it looks physically possible until you watch somebody do it twice in one rally.

The calendar clusters strangely. Cooper’s Hill goes on the spring bank holiday Monday and the Cotswold Olimpicks follow later that same week, so one trip west gets you cheese injuries and shin injuries in a single weekend. Bog snorkelling lands in August. Toe wrestling took its 2026 slot in mid-July. Bring a coat.