What Weird Sport Does Your Country Enjoy?

So I'm currently an Australian studying at an Australian university and their is a tonne of international students living on campus. I really wanted to teach the American's some of the weird sports Australian's enjoy. In particular Australian Football which is really like no other sport. After taking them to a game I started wondering about national sports that other countries might not know of. So what else is out there? I recently discovered Gaelic Football which seems pretty cool. Is there more sports outside of the major international games that we might not know of?

Oh and for those wanting to know what Australian Football looks like this is it:

Well, I'm Australian and came into talk about AFL but I see you've already done that!

Go the blues. :)

I was gonna say Australian football.

I don't know if "weird" is the right word.

Ugh... It could've been Collingwood. That being said, Swans man. Those Swans.

@audiobusting: wtf?

@audiobusting: well that wasn't exactly what I had in mind but I'll add it to the list hahaha

@gloriousdinosaur: GO THE BLOODS!

@ryanmc94: Man have we got a rough last two rounds. Geelong then Hawthorn. One win guarantees a top four finish though... Holding out for one over Geelong. Just got to hope Tippett keeps firing

@gloriousdinosaur: Yeah Tippett being out would be a real kick in the balls. I'll be at the Hawthorne game next Friday. Here's hoping our injuries clear up and we knock them around a bit.

@ryanmc94: @falserelic: It's not really a national sports (badminton is much closer to being that), but it's a pretty well known game. I'm not sure where it came from.

I'm not sure I'd call Aussie rules (as it's colloquially known here) that weird, but maybe that's just cause they show it on tv here.

I don't know what you'd really refer to as weird, the 3 main sports in England are the 3 biggest sports in the world.

We Swedes used to be real into Bandy, but it's a sport that's been on the decline the last decade or so. We've lobbied to get it into the Winter Olympics, but we've been rejected so far, probably because every year it would come down to finals between Sweden and Russia, with the occasional other Nordic Country thrown in.

Edit: also handball.

I guess Darts & Cricket are the weirdest sports we enjoy here in the UK. In fact, I believe the former was brought up by one Bradley Shoemaker on the Bombcast a couple of weeks ago.

@creamypies: You Brits and your darts! I'll never get it hahaha

@gkhan: Bandy seems pretty cool. How much does it differ from ice hockey?

The field is MUCH larger than an ice-hockey rink, and because you use a ball instead of a puck, it's a lot faster. There's also much less of a focus on things like tackling, the players don't have nearly as much protection. There's also none of the intentional fighting thing that's in hockey (though Swedish hockey generally doesn't have that either).The goals are also much larger than than a hockey goal. There's plenty of videos on YouTube showing the sport, like this full game between Sweden and Russia. Jump around in the video a bit, and you'll get a sense of the game.

I should also add a variant of the sport called Floorball (in Sweden it's referred to as "indoor bandy") which is played on land (generally, but not necessarily, inside a building) is very popular with young people. As a kid, I played more floorball than any other sport besides soccer, me and my friends would set up two goals on a street and go at it for hours on end.

The darts is more about the oppourtunity for the audience to get shit-faced and sing songs. Go back a few years and even the players were drinking and smoking up on stage. I used to have to go to a lot of darts for my job and it is basically just a huge pub. Some of the games up in Scotland used to get quite scary, espcially if they found out you were English.

In the Premier league they play four matches a night. For the first the crowd is boisterous but paying attention, by the second they are rowdy but still watching the game and for the last two they pretty much ignore the darts and are either fighting or singing random songs.

yea know whit shinty not weird it's just not a well known sport outside of alba, so here another sport that happens in scotland that i can think of that best describes weird sport. plus in the uk rounders is a game that is played a lot by everyone especially youngers, think this is how baseball got its origins from as its a very old game with basically the same fundamental rules. Used to play it as a child all the time, at the annual gala everyone from our village young and old would team up and beer kegs were used for bases, good times.

Finland has a lot of weird sports, like Wife carrying championships...

Swamp soccer...

...and boot-throwing.

We are kinda weird, I know.

As an American I find nothing weird about Aussie Rules Football.

Not an American sport but I find Pesapallo fascinating and really weird.

Here it is with you music you may know:

This GIF got some attention on reddit recently.

Fierljeppen.

While some sports have been mentioned from Sweden in here. I would like to point out Speedway (or motorcycle speedway). Here's a wikipedia explanation; "Motorcycle speedway, usually referred to as speedway, is a motorcycle sport involving four and sometimes up to six riders competing over four anti-clockwise laps of an oval circuit. Speedway motorcycles use only one gear and have no brakes and racing takes place on a flat oval track usually consisting of dirt or loosely packed shale. Competitors use this surface to slide their machines sideways, powersliding orbroadsiding into the bends. On the straight sections of the track the motorcycles reach speeds of up 70 miles per hour (110 km/h)"

I've always found the sport odd and really boring to watch and from what I can find, not entirely sure how popular it is generally speaking. However, we're one of the few nations with an elite league and have, relative to country size, a lot of top competitors.

It focuses on crashes, but it got plenty of meat-and-potato sections on the actual thing.

I'm currently an American and there's this thing called Dressage our rich people enjoy.

Pretty timely reference, right guys?

I'm sure most people outside of the USA view American Football as being "weird". It's accepted internationally because of the commercial success in USA and Canada, but I think everyone can agree that it's pretty boring: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575002852055561406.html

This might be a quibble but is a dancing horse really a sport? That seems to be more like "an activity".

I suppose technically Lacrosse is the national sport of Canada. I'd say we enjoy Canadian Football, Curling and Ringette more though. In some parts of the country there is a type of handball played called Zazpiak Bat.

Activity Sports.

American football is weird in so much you rarely use the player's feet with the ball.

Off the top of my head I think tractor pulling is the most pointless "sport" in my country, though I´m not sure its popularity stretches much beyond a small minority, one obviously connected to farming.

By the way the flags are not a sign of Nationalism as such, it is more of symbol for a general sense of celebration and joy (unless of course it is on half, meaning someone has died). At the same time it is an empty symbol, not in a negative sense, more in the that it means whatever you want it to mean. Also it is apparently the oldest still used national flag in the world, how about that.

Down around Nantucket way; we lower a basket into the water, we drag a great white into it, some brave idiots jumps into four feet of water to grab the tail as the basket gets lifted out of the water.

U.S. Football.

Cheese Rolling. Every year they throw a lump of cheese down a steep hill in Gloucestershire, and a bunch of idiots run after it. It's not the most popular sport ever, but it makes it onto BBC national news every year, without fail.

@scampbell: when i was a kid, for some reason my dad used to get these NHRA, Outlaw and tractor pull race videos (VHS/BETA?) (mid 1980's) and they were out of Denmark (but with english announcers). I have literally not thought about them since I was 9 or 10. For whatever reason I fucking loved them...so weird to have those memories resurface. :) All I can remember is they would have these neat sleds attached to them that would incline a weight and they would be judged by distance? Shit was really mesmerising to a 7 year old boy :P

Edit: lol still crazy mesmerising! why in the fuck do I find it so interesting?

Edit2: Is there any skill involved with this or ist it straight up horsepower? Dat diesel powered smoke belching...

Edit3: go ford! USA! USA!

Edit4: So I don't know regionally but in the north east (usa) Lacrosse is wildly popular (mix hockey with soccer and jai lai). Shit didn't have tractors in it so I never gave two shits about it.... man that john deere truck needs to respecinize.

Edit5: my next vacation is to Denmark to watch this shit live.

I don't know about all of Canada, but here in New Brunswick Rugby is huge in many of the schools. The school I went to in particular were one of those schools that seemed to win provincials every year or every other year. I remember the gym walls being covered in banners. No idea what they are like now as I have not been in almost ten years.

I know Rugby isn't so much weird, but it's a sport that I never hear of anywhere but I remember my school being crazy for it. Well the jocks anyway.

@tescovee: I've grown up on a farm though my parents weren't actual farmers, mainly they enjoy the idea of being mostly self sufficient. They did own a field for the purpose of feeding the goats and sheep during winter. The work they did themselves in terms of tending to the field was transporting the hay back to our farm. To do this they borrowed and old red John Deere tractor one with no enclosure, in fact it barely had a seat.

As most of the work was done off the road I was occasionally allowed to drive it and almost toppled it once. Good times.

I honestly don't know much about tractor pulling but I think it mostly horsepower though a bit of technique probably doesn't hurt.

And here I thought our cultural influence had ended with with H.C. Anderson...

Football, baseball, basketball, hockey... take your pick.

Baseball's pretty strange:

• The play field is not symmetrical.
• The defense has possession of the ball.
• The best players are those who fail at hitting 70% of the time.
• There's no clock.

Well Hockey and Lacrosse aren't really that weird, I guess Curling maybe? It's essentially just shuffleboard on ice. Broomball I guess could also be counted though not sure if that's distinctly from Canada. It's pretty much hockey but with a ball instead of a puck(larger than a ball hockey ball, more like a dodgeball I think) and brooms instead of sticks, plus you are just wearing normal shoes on the ice. Only played it a couple times back in highschool and it was a clusterfuck each time.

@crusader8463: Rugby is pretty big over here in Victoria B.C.

The weirdest American sport has gotta be Nascar, right?

And the amount of enjoyment a spectator has is directly proportional to the amount of beer he has consumed.

In the US by far it is competitive eating.

@zella: I love curling. Playing in evening leagues, its half sport, half night at the pub.

In the USA

Wrestling

and College Football

I will just leave this here http://www.topendsports.com/sport/unusual/hemp-olympics.htm.[its clean do not worry to look] where no one wins, cos they fallin asleep by the time they reach the finish line.