If the classic Olympic sports send you to sleep then get your thrills watching horseback wrestling at the 2024 World Nomad Games
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You might be mistaken into thinking that the only sporting event worth commenting on this summer is the Paris Olympics. But, later this summer, and in a setting far removed from the Champs-Elysées, another big sporting event is taking place, but it’s one in which the only competitors are nomads.
The fifth World Nomad Games, which will take place in the huge Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan from 8 to13 September 2024, will bring together some 2,500 athletes from a hundred different countries. This biennial event celebrates the traditional sport and cultural heritage of the world’s estimated 40 million nomadic people. Some of these sports – such as horseback wrestling, hunting with birds, arm-wrestling, tug-of-war, and togyzkumalak, (kind of like a giant game of droughts) –certainly aren’t the sort of sports that you will see played out in the Olympic stadiums of Paris this summer.
The event is more than just about traditional sports, though. Nomadic culture, an often overlooked part of a nation’s cultural identity, quite rightfully gets a prime billing at the World Nomad Games. Crafts, music, dance, dress, and food of many of the participating nomadic groups will come under the spotlight.
One of the highlights of the Olympics is, of course, the opening ceremony, and the World Nomad Games are no different, except that in this case, instead of an eternal flame, the focus is on water. For many nomadic people, water is the focus of their movements, and they and their livestock are in constant motion in the search for new, rain-fed grass for their animals or fresh water to drink. To mark the importance of water in nomadic life, the opening ceremony involves water from sacred springs across Kazakhstan being carried to the host city of Astana where the waters will be mingled.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan emphasized the significance of the games, ‘The World Nomad Games in Kazakhstan will be a major event. They are important both for the popularization of national sports and a healthy lifestyle, and for the expansion of cultural and humanitarian ties between fraternal peoples – heirs of the nomadic civilization of the Great Steppe.’
The World Nomad Games were first held in Kyrgyzstan in 2014 when they attracted 583 athletes from 19 countries.
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