10 Ludicrous Sports You've Probably Never Heard Of
2. Bo-taoshi
Like a lunatic version of capture the flag, bo-taoshi is played by teams of cadets at military schools in Japan: if by ‘teams’, you mean ‘armies’, and ‘cadets’, you mean suicidal nutcases in formal shirt and trousers hurling themselves at each other.
Literally translating as ‘bring pole down’, bo-taoshi involves teams of seventy-five (75) a side, where the object is to bring down the opposing team’s pole: by craft, by art, by hook and by crook, but fundamentally by weight of numbers.
As in most team games, different players occupy different strategic positions. The ‘scrum’ here is the mob that clusters up against the wall of opposing players so that the ‘springboards’ can literally sprint up them to gain a height advantage to throw themselves up and over that wall. The defending team will have players whose only role is to disable the scrum to prevent the springboards from getting their foothold.
Some schools will have a single player sitting atop the defending pole, which is usually more like a small tree: he’s the ninja, responsible for defending (usually by the use of well-placed barefoot kicks) the top of the pole from opposing team members looking to grab the top and use their weight to bring the thing down.
Ba-taoshi is frenetic, brutal, exciting and really, really quick - often a game will last minutes. Which is a good thing too, given how vicious the sport is. It makes rugby and Australian rules football look like kindergarten games for sleepy toddlers.