Friday, October 9, 2009

Finally, a winter sport more obscure than snowshoeing

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are probably familiar with the relatively obscure sport of snowshoeing (aka racket racing). If you were to rank competitive winter sports by how mainstream they are (in terms of overall popularity, media coverage, prestige of major titles, olympicness, et cetera) the list would probably look like this:

More mainstream
Downhill/freestyle skiing
Downhill/freestyle snowboarding
Figure skating (female and pairs)
Ice fishing
Drunken sledding (NCAA)
Cross-country skiing
Bobsledding
Ice dancing
Ski jumping
Skijoring
Luge
Skeleton racing
Ice sculpting (chainsaw division)
Curling
Speedskating
Sasquatch wrestling
Figure skating (male)
Short-track speedskating
Drunken sledding (non-NCAA)
Biathlon
Ice sculpting (non-chainsaw division)
Snowshoe racing
Less mainstream

Recently, the folks blogging for Outside Magazine have posted a video of a new sport called cross-country snowboarding which promises to dethrone snowshoeing as winter's most obscure sport. The video is a pretty good way to spend three minutes of your day and the comments section needs more input from people who do not realize that this is a mockumentary.

Above: the largest event (Curley's 2004) in the most obscure sport (snowshoe racing) in the center of the snowshoe racing universe (western Mass)

4 comments:

  1. If you're looking for another obscure winter sport, check out the X-Games version of XC skiing, called Nordix.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmXBpIjnnW4

    ReplyDelete
  2. Whoa, I didn't know that this even existed! How much more random can it get? Atleast theres no Yaktrax marathon's that people run.... That will be the end of it!

    ReplyDelete
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