Goat Polo

One of the days at Song Kul we witnessed a local sport, best described as Goat Polo.
A fairly gruesome game by our soft western standards, Goat Polo is a game played by two teams of men on horseback. It is preceded by the ceremonial sacrifice of a goat, after which the head and lower limbs are removed. The rest of the goat is used in the game, the object of which is to place the dead goat onto the target.


When one man is holding the goat, the opponents will try and grab it off him. At one point, 2 men were fighting over it, one had hold of one hind leg, the other had the other hind leg and they were both pulling very hard. If the goat wasn't already very dead I'd have felt quite sorry for it. The game has no boundaries so it's very necessary for the spectators to be alert, as you may have to run out of the way at any time. The horses are so hyped up they'd just go straight over you. Last year, someone's tent was in the wrong place at the wrong time, result - no more tent. This year we moved all the tents to be huddled up together behind the truck.

The game is followed by horseback wrestling, where two men attempt to try and pull each other from their horses. Finally, what can only be described as a more serious version of the old schoolyard classic 'kiss-chase': where a man persues a woman on horseback, and gets to marry her if he catches up. That's now we married one of our number, Roberta, off to a Kyrgyz. It would have been rude of her to win.