The Proto-Olympics: Mongolia's Weird, Inspiring “Three Games Of Men”

Strange sports are usually very hard to find these days: the ratings indicate that we, collectively, would rather hear someone talk about the NFL than watch, say, a lumberjacking contest or Australian-rules football.


But every four years one particular set of strange sports gets its moment at the Olympics, and over the weekend we've already seen numerous fencers and archers and table-tennis champions charm the country, their uncontrived excitement and anonymously-honed excellence breaking through NBC's primary coverage, which tends to ignore anyone who has not already been in a Gatorade ad.

But for those of us who celebrate the marginal competitions of the world, whose very strangeness renders them immune from corporate and bureaucratic defilement, there is a level of weirdness beyond fencing, beyond even lumberjackery: Mongolia’s just-concluded Naadam festival, which makes even the most obscure ESPN2 competitions look about as authentic and spontaneous as a Super Bowl halftime show.

The name Naadam is short for Eriin Gurvan Naadam, which translates to “The Three Games of Men,” and is a sort of miniature — miniature only in that it’s comprised of three events — olympiad.

Like the Olympics, Naadam features an elaborate opening ceremony. But while London’s featured the usual derp-o theme songs, this year’s just-concluded Naadam in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar opened with a (possibly geopolitically significant) two-song set from the Chinese rock band Banana Monkey. An iconic image defines the games, but Naadam’s answer to the Olympic rings are nine totems driven into the earth. They’re called the Nine Yak Tails, and Naadam wrestlers perform an arm-waving eagle dance around the Yak Tails before every bout. You are maybe starting to see how this is different from the Olympics.

There is an equestrian aspect to Naadam, but Naadam’s involves kids ranging in age from kindergartner to tween tear-assing around the Mongolian steppe on the backs of horses, for 20 kilometers. Archery is a part of Naadam, although Naadam’s archers — men and women alike — don traditional Mongolian garb for the event; that’s about the only difference, really, archery being archery. (Despite the “of Men” in Naadam’s name, women are in fact allowed to compete in both horse racing and archery.) And, most of all, there is wrestling in Naadam. There’s wrestling in London, too, with the difference being that Naadam’s hilariously ponderous wrestling matches are held between men wearing bikini-style underpants, knee-high boots and long-sleeved vestlets that would, in the world of women’s fashion, be called shrugs.

“Matches generally feature a few seconds in which wrestlers circle in a slow-motion scrum, punctuated by endless breaks for conferences with coaches,” the Wall Street Journal‘s Ron Gluckman wrote back in 2003. “One semi-final match lasts two hours, with perhaps 10 minutes of activity. ‘A great battle,’ proclaims one excited Mongolian, adding that past matches have lasted four hours.”

YouTube confirms all this, while demonstrating that any number of these lengthy, brief-clad grapple-and-strategize sessions are held simultaneously, on an open soccer field. Advance past a given round and you earn the right to a given animal title: falcon, elephant, garuda (a bird-like Hindu deity). There is also a great deal of traditional dancing and singing involved, and that too is unlike anything most Naadam non-attendees have ever seen.

Source : buzzfeed