History's Strangest Sports Traditions

A list of the weirdest and most fascinating trivia about ancient sports that I found.

1. Mayans played a game similar to basketball with human skulls.💀

2. Ancient Olympic runners ran stark naked. The tradition began when a runner lost his loincloth while running and tripped on it. Soon it became a tradition to run without any clothes on. And after a female coach was caught disguised as a man to coach her son (females were banned from participating or coaching in ancient Greece 😒), all coaches were required to be naked too (to prove they were males)!

3. Nudity even gave us the word gymnasium -- it is derived from the ancient Greek word for naked, gymnos.

4. One running event called Hoplitodromos required athletes to run decked out in full armor (while still naked!), The armor weighed 70 pounds- when they tried to recreate the sport recently, no one was able to go more than halfway of the 400 meters,

Amphora showing Hoplitodromos sport

5. Other sports required nudity as well-- in wrestling they wore no clothes but slathered oil on their bodies, which they scraped off with a special tool and offered to spectators after the match. And supposedly, the oil/mud/sweat filled gunk was very popular with fans!

6. Performance-enhancing aka doping was rampant in the ancient Olympics. The most popular performance enhancer was sheep testicles, but alternatives included live bees and lizard paste.

7. A mixed martial arts sport called Pankration allowed the wrestlers to do anything except biting (Mike Tyson would still be disqualified!), eye-gouging and beating testicles. One athlete was famous for breaking his opponents' fingertips, another died from suffocation but not before breaking his opponent's toes and being declared winner.

Amphora showing wrestling in ancient Olympics

Sources:

https://listverse.com/2016/12/13/10-weird-traditions-from-the-ancient-olympic-games/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ancient-greece-olympics-sports

https://brewminate.com/pherenike-the-female-olympic-trainer-in-ancient-greece/

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