10 Ludicrous Sports You've Probably Never Heard Of

What the hell are they playing at?

By Jack Morrell /

Every sport known to man must have seemed bloody stupid when it was first introduced to the world. Imagine being an alien, seeing soccer for the first time and watching, flabbergasted, as teams of uniformed men run backwards and forwards trying to place an inflated pigskin in the back of a large net without using their hands.

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With other sports, you don’t even have to adopt that extraterrestrial perspective. Tennis and cricket don't make a lot of sense to their own fans, never mind to uninvolved observers, while dodgeball and roller derby are recent additions to the team sports milieu where the faint line between batsh*t and banality is scuffed almost to nothing.

And then there are the truly ridiculous sports, the ones seemingly invented by lunatics with too much time on their hands.

From oddball spins on well-known games, to off-the-wall digressions into bat country, these are ten of the most ludicrous, insane sports you’ve probably never actually heard of.

10. Outhouse Racing

Heading straight into the high-concept gimmickry, here’s Robot Wars crossed with the Wacky Races. Towns all the way across America have been hosting incredibly popular outhouse racing events for decades. To give you an example, Trenary, Michigan runs the Outhouse Classic, bringing in around 4000 spectators every year; a feat that doesn’t seem so impressive until you remember that Trenary’s population is less than 600.

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Wherever it takes place - and outhouse racing tends to be an annual tradition rather than a league sport - the rules are more or less the same. Racing outhouses are constructed to around 5 foot by 2.5 foot with at least three sides, a seat and toilet paper. The toilet paper is mandatory because a) this might be Hicksville, but they’re not mutant cannibals, and b) where would you put a bidet?

The contraption is then mounted on giant skis and pushed, pulled or otherwise yanked to the finish by two members of the three-person team, the third sitting astride the throne and egging them on like someone’s ha-yucking hillbilly grandpa.

All this, and some of the worst/best (depending on your point of view) toilet humour you’ll ever experience - but don’t get the wrong idea, this isn’t just some drunken fancy dress sh*tshow. Competition can be fierce. There are, after all, no prizes for turd place.

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