When it comes to the weird and wild world of wacky sports, there seems to be no limit on the peculiar. People, perhaps a shade eccentric, perhaps prior victims of severe head trauma, love to push the envelope when it comes to competition.

Buzkashi: Central Asia

Of course, sports such as baseball and cricket are no less strange than a recreation as arbitrary as Buzkashi. Not familiar with Buzkashi? The ancient Central Asia team sport popular in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and pretty much all of the ?stan? nations? Well, Buzkashi is a peaceful game that features men on horseback who viciously fight for possession of a goat, sheep or calf carcass, or sometimes just the head, and attempt to throw it into a ?Circle of Justice? to score points. Riders often lash opponents with whips or trip them off their horse to gain control of the precious decapitated head.

Really now. Is that more bizarre than baseball, a game where grown men chew tobacco while they wait their turn to take a swing at a thrown ball from 60.5 feet out? A game where septuagenarian managers wear the same comical uniforms as the players (imagine if that were the case in the NFL?). How about the strange fact that each baseball diamond in MLB has distinct dimensions? Think about that and apply it to hockey, or soccer for that matter. Weird indeed.

Oddball is insufficient to describe cricket. Despite that, no other sport, with the possible exception of soccer, arouses national passions quite like this strange pastime. Truly an acquired taste, much like durian or Vegemite, cricket has the most eclectic and kooky terms to describe various aspects of the game. Silly mid-off, fly slip, sticky, Yorker, Night Watchman: no, these are not fantasy creations from a Lewis Carroll children?s story, these are very real examples from the cricket lexicon. With matches that can last up to five days, breaks for afternoon tea and uniforms that are straight out of a Prep school catalogue, is the sport that much more outlandish that one where bloodthirsty Uzbek horsemen wage battle over a goat?s head?

Elephant Polo: Nepal, India (Rajasthan), Sri Lanka, Thailand

You may as well throw conventional polo in the mix, what with all the pomp and absurd ceremony that surrounds the asinine sport. Elephant polo however, takes the farcical nonsense to another level. Why anyone would want to mount a pachyderm to swat a ball with a long bamboo mallet is beyond rational logic. Popular rumour has it that the game first began on a drunken dare. Surprise, surprise. Believe it or not, the sport has a real association with actual tournaments and gasp! … corporate sponsorships.

The World Elephant Polo Association, or WEPA, has been around for over 25 years, to the astonishment of cynics sceptical from the outset that the sport would ever take root and find an audience. Well, find one it did, from a humble birth at Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge in Nepal to grand events in Hong Kong and even the UK. Chivas Regal is a long-time sponsor of elephant polo tournaments, which makes us wonder if the whisky is partly to blame for that epochal day when man thought it would be a good idea to play polo with elephants.

Polo on camels, now that is a sport!

Great deals on hotels in Thailand await those anxious to see elephant polo in person … among other attractions in Southeast Asia.

Chess Boxing: Germany and other parts of Europe

This from the World Chess Boxing Organization website FAQ:

Chessboxers go through alternating four-minute long rounds of chess and three-minute boxing rounds with a one-minute break in between. A maximum total of 11 rounds are fought out?six rounds of chess and five rounds of boxing. The fight begins with a round of chess.

Uh, come again? The fight begins with a round of chess. Why IS that exactly? Well, the powers that be over at the WCBO claim that the sport is the ?ultimate challenge for body and mind.? Why do we suspect that these individuals took one too many bare-knuckled blows to the cranium when they drew up the business plan for this event on their Etch A Sketch?

For now at least, chessboxers ? how is that even a word? ? practice at tournaments around Germany primarily, where people actually pay to see men like Frank ?Anti Terror? Stoldt (we think ?Pawnbroker? is a better nickname) checkmate and wail blows on the likes of David ?Double D? Depto. Did we mention there are musical acts in between rounds? And merchandise? Wow.

You have to dole out mad props to the inventors of the sport for sheer ambition. For one, they seem to take themselves rather seriously in their website literature. We rightly thought the entire notion was a ruse, a practical joke but upon further inspection and to our dismay, these people do believe that chess and pugilism go together. More audaciously, they plan to appeal to the IOC to introduce the discipline as a demonstration event at a future Olympics. Incredible. A rule that competitors must uphold a minimum world chess rank is perhaps the only evidence of sound logic here, although it does block the potential for a bloody Mike Tyson-Gary Kasparov throwdown.

Want to witness chessboxers in action? Check out some great rates on hotels in Germany.

Read about more oddball sports in our next installment!

Photo credits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6