- [Voiceover] These days, spectator sports
often get a bad rap.
They're called everything from
bread and circus shows to a waste of time.
But what most people don't know
is that things could be a lot worse.
These are the five strangest sports ever played.
Number five is the game of auto polo.
Auto Polo was a strange motor sport that was played
in the United States in the early 1900s.
The game was almost identical to normal games of polo.
Only, players of auto polo used automobiles
to travel across the playing field instead of horses.
The game involved four players,
each driving an automobile.
And the objective was to drive your car
close to top speed, while trying to score
with specially designed croquet mallets.
Auto polo players often would reach top speeds
of forty miles per hour while making hairpin turns.
During auto polo matches,
cars would often collide with each other
and become entangled.
But players frequently find themselves
ejected from their cars by the shock of the impact.
Unsurprisingly, auto polo eventually died out as a sport,
by the 1920s.
Number four is the dangerous sport of
slå katten af tønden, which means
"to beat the cat out of the barrel."
During the Danish carnival known as fastelavn,
a live black cat would be stuffed into a barrel.
Then the barrel would be hung upside down from a tree.
The objective of slå katten af tønden
was to use the massive sticks
to beat a barrel containing the captive black cat
until the barrel broke.
The first person to break apart their barrel
would win the sport of slå katten af tønden.
Unfortunately, in some cases
the winner of slå katten af tønden
wasn't even declared until the cat inside the barrel
was beaten to death.
Whoever won the sadistic game would be either crowned
as the local cat king or cat queen.
Thankfully, this sport was changed in the year 1600.
And cats were no longer tormented
as part of this bizarre sport,
with the barrels now containing candy
intsead of terrified felines.
Number three is the French sport of canne de combat.
Canne de combat was a 19th-century sport
played primarly by the French upper classes.
This sport was designed so the French elite
could practice their martial arts skills
in case they were ever attacked
in one of France's many urban areas.
The sport required a mixture
of martial arts and sword fighting skills.
Canne de combat players wore padding
to protect themselves while violently swinging at each other
with thin chestnut canes.
In a match of canne de combat,
a player's striking cane must be held with one hand.
Striking blows on the opposing player
are made either horizontally or downward.
Thrusting or stabbing blows are prohibited
by the rules of the game.
A match of canne de combat is won by a point system,
as the lightness of the cane used in canne de combat
and the protective clothing worn
made a complete knockout of the opposing player impossible.
While canne de combat is still played today,
it does not hold the same popularity
it one held during the 19th century.
Number two is the sport of fox tossing.
Fox tossing was a popular competitive sport
that was played by the European aristrocracy
during the 17th and 18th centuries.
As the name implies,
this sport was not a very kind affair.
Players would use massive slings
to catapult foxes up into the air.
Then the player who catapulted their fox the highest
would be declared the winner of the contest.
This quirky sport was not without its dangers,
for both the foxes as well as the players.
This is because sometimes
the foxes that were loaded into the slingshots
would often turn on the players and viciously attack.
Unfortunately, this sport was often fatal
for the foxes that were loaded into the slingshots,
with few foxes surviving the impact when they landed.
And number one is the Viking sport of glima.
Viewed as the foundation for the Viking warrior,
this sport has drastically changed over the centuries.
The strange aspect of glima
can be found in its Viking origins.
Glima originally called for a battle to the death
in which two combatants would
hurl their adversaries as far as they could,
in order to break their spines.
Today, glima is still played
across all Scandinavian countries,
but the game is no longer fought until the death.
And belts have been added
so the players can more easily pick up their opponents
and throw them to the ground.
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