10 Ludicrous Sports You've Probably Never Heard Of

Believe it or not, dwarf tossing isn’t just some crappy joke in Lord Of The Rings, and it’s not niche pornography either. The gag in question comes from the genuine, decades-old, real life pastime of throwing heavily padded-up little people at stuff.

The ‘stuff’ in question tends to vary - it can range from mattresses and piles of cardboard boxes or pillows to a more high-concept version involving walls specially covered in Velcro. The aim of the tossing? To get your little person as high or as far as possible, higher and further than the people you’re competing with.

Apparently most developed nations have, at some point, also developed a version of dwarf tossing… and most of those developed nations have almost immediately developed some legislation to Ban This Sick Filth. The idea is that it’s weird, wrong and just generally deeply unsettling to run a sporting event based on throwing people affected by dwarfism into walls and floors, even consensually. Political correctness gone mad, surely?

The ‘dwarf tossing’ references in Lord Of The Rings are a specifically New Zealander in-joke, as the sport of dwarf tossing has always been far more widespread in the Antipodes than in Europe and America. If you’re a proper movie buff, you’ll also have seen the sport immortalised in Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street.