5 of the Most Unusual Sports Played Around the Globe

Sports are an excellent activity to get out and make new friends and let your competitive streak shine a bit. There are some sports that everyone knows about like volleyball, hockey or baseball, but this guide is here to let you know about five unusual sports that are easy to learn and lots of fun.

Lumberjack Competition

This sport is a lot of fun to watch and is especially popular in Canada and the United States. The Lumberjack World Championships are held every year at the Lumberjack Bowl in Wisconsin. Men and women can both compete and show off their log hewing expertise with a huge range of competitions including wood chopping, sawing, log rolling and climbing, with names like birling, double buck, boom run and more. Bring your flannel and get ready for a wood-tastic time.¹

Chess Boxing

If you like boxing and chess then the sport of chess boxing will be right up your alley. Chess boxing is most popular in the UK, Germany and Russia. For this sport you dress for boxing and alternate rounds of chess with rounds of boxing up to 11 rounds.

That’s more than long enough for the physical-mental combo to start getting very challenging: it’s pretty hard to remember that your queen is in danger when you just got clocked with a stiff right hook one minute ago.

This sport is a real example of combining the physical with the mental. If you knock out your opponent or checkmate them then you are the winner. Chess boxing may be fun to watch, but the boxing aspect makes it quite dangerous to play.²

Tuna Tossing

Just the name of this sport probably brings a smile to your lips – or if you’re hungry maybe it makes you think of a delicious sandwich. Either way, tuna tossing comes courtesy of our friends Down Under and was invented in the Australian town of Port Lincoln. Fishermen from the town used to throw the fish onto their trucks and it eventually became a competition.

These are big, too, we’re talking up to 20 pounds. These days people usually use rubber fish, but either way, stay tuned for tuna tossing one of these days on the Olympics – you never know.³

Wife Carrying

This sport is basically what it sounds like. No wife? No problem, any woman will do. The sport started in Finland and came over to the states by the late 1990s. You have to carry your wife or designated female on your back while running through an obstacle course.

Any dropping and five seconds is added to your course time – plus your partner will probably be just a little ticked off with you. The team with the quickest time for the course wins.⁴

Pumpkin Kayaking

Kayaking is a lot of fun, so imagine how it feels in a giant carved out pumpkin. Pretty radical, you just have to absolutely make sure that your pumpkin is both big enough and airtight enough that you can actually stay afloat in it and paddle around. From there on in it’s a piece of cake – or pumpkin.

This sport started in Nova Scotia, Canada where an annual half-a-mile pumpkin kayak race takes place on Lake Pesaquid and there is also a large pumpkin race held every year in Tualatin, Oregon called the West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta. The festival in Oregon is always timed for Halloween so you get to see wacky costumes and dedicated pumpkin paddlers strut their stuff on the lake. Sounds like a lot of fun, sign me up.³


[1] https://www.tiebreaker.com/strange-sports/
[2] https://blog.go-today.com/unique-experiences/worlds-unusual-sports/
[3] https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=15239
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/unusual-sports-around-the-world-2016-3