Weird competitions have a way of making perfectly reasonable questions sound ridiculous. How fast can you chase a wheel of cheese down a hill? Can you win a sporting event with nothing but your toes? And what happens when someone decides a bathtub belongs in a race?
The answer, apparently, is to organize a competition. Around the world, communities have turned unlikely skills, local traditions, food, endurance, and pure theatrical commitment into real contests with actual rules and actual winners. These 17 are proof that almost anything can become competitive once someone starts keeping score.
1. Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling
A steep hill in Gloucestershire becomes a racetrack when competitors charge downhill after a rolling wheel of cheese. Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling is visually spectacular for one obvious reason: gravity is doing most of the directing. The objective is essentially to get down the hill faster than everyone else, while the cheese races ahead and contestants tumble, sprint, and occasionally discover that staying upright was an overly ambitious plan. It is less a graceful chase than a very British negotiation with a hillside.
2. Wife Carrying World Championships
In Sonkajärvi, Finland, carrying your partner can become a competitive strategy. The Wife Carrying World Championships send pairs through a course in which one competitor carries the other, turning balance, speed, strength, and coordination into a single wonderfully unusual challenge. Despite the name, it should not be mistaken for some universal Finnish custom. It is a specific organized event with its own course and eligibility rules. The photo alone makes one thing obvious: choosing your carrying technique is part of the game.
3. World Bog Snorkelling Championships
Forget a crystal-clear swimming pool. In Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales, competitors tackle a peat bog wearing snorkels and flippers. The World Bog Snorkelling Championships involve racing through a bog trench under rules that restrict how participants propel themselves. It raises a question few swimmers have probably considered: how fast could you move if your swimming lane looked more like a muddy ditch? Whatever the answer, visibility is definitely not the event’s main selling point.
4. World Conker Championships
The equipment could fit in your pocket: a horse chestnut, known as a conker, attached to a string. At the World Conker Championships, competitors take turns trying to smash an opponent’s conker while protecting their own. What sounds like a playground diversion becomes remarkably serious once strict equipment rules and organized competition enter the picture. There is also a charitable side to the event, giving all that enthusiastic chestnut destruction a purpose beyond discovering whose conker survives longest.
5. World Worm Charming Championships
Here, the competitors are not trying to catch worms. They are trying to persuade them to appear. The World Worm Charming Championships in Willaston challenge participants to attract earthworms from a designated patch of soil using vibrations rather than simply digging them out by hand. The sight of a field full of people intensely working tiny plots makes considerably more sense once you know what is happening underneath. Who knew convincing worms to come upstairs could become a competitive skill?
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6. World Toe Wrestling Championships
Arm wrestling apparently left one extremity completely underserved. Toe wrestling fixes that. Competitors lock toes and attempt to force an opponent’s foot to one side, turning something that sounds invented during a particularly slow evening into an organized niche sport. Matches have defined ways to determine a winner, and the championship has attracted enough attention to produce trophies that look far more dignified than the activity they celebrate. Few sports can say their trophy collection includes a giant foot.
7. World Gravy Wrestling Championships
Wrestling is difficult enough before someone fills the arena with gravy. At the World Gravy Wrestling Championships in Stacksteads, competitors wrestle through short bouts in a pool of the stuff, with performance and costumes adding another layer to the spectacle. The event also has a charity component, but visually there is no getting around the central premise: two people attempting athletic moves while covered in gravy. At some point, grip stops being an advantage and becomes a distant memory.
8. World Black Pudding Throwing Championships
The target is Yorkshire pudding. The projectile is black pudding. In Ramsbottom, competitors throw black puddings toward stacks of Yorkshire puddings in an attempt to knock them down. Yes, this is a real competition, and no, the rules do not become less peculiar once explained. The contest has charitable associations, while its modern description is much safer territory than the colorful origin stories sometimes repeated online. How many sports can turn lunch ingredients into both equipment and targets?
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9. World Gurning Championships
Some competitions reward composure. This one rewards what happens when you abandon it completely. At the World Gurning Championships, part of the Egremont Crab Fair tradition, competitors contort their faces while framed by a horse collar. The resulting expressions range from impressive to almost anatomically puzzling. There is no sprinting, throwing, or wrestling required here. Victory depends on making your own face do something memorable enough to stand out in a field where everyone else is trying to look equally extraordinary.
10. Air Guitar World Championships
Weird competitions do not require actual sporting equipment, and the Air Guitar World Championship proves they do not always require actual equipment at all. In Oulu, Finland, performers take the stage with imaginary guitars and commit completely to choreographed performances judged on qualities including stage presence and authenticity. The instrument may be invisible, but the competition certainly is not. A crowd, a stage, elaborate performances, and serious commitment turn pretending to play guitar into something surprisingly close to performance art with a scoreboard.
11. World Mobile Phone Throwing Championships
Before tossing a frustrating phone across the room could become an expensive mistake, Finland turned the basic impulse into a novelty competition. The World Mobile Phone Throwing Championships included categories built around distance and freestyle throwing, transforming obsolete technology into sporting equipment. Event status has varied over time, so it belongs to the stranger history of organized competitions rather than being assumed to run continuously today. Still, few contests have ever made getting rid of an old phone look quite so satisfying.
12. World Championship of Nettle Eating
How do you make an eating contest substantially less inviting? Replace the usual pies or hot dogs with stinging nettles. The Dorset competition challenges participants to consume nettles in a measurable contest that rewards endurance of a particularly prickly variety. This is firmly a watch-rather-than-copy spectacle, since eating challenges involving stinging plants are not something readers should casually recreate. For competitors, however, an ordinary patch of greenery becomes the unlikely centerpiece of a championship.
13. World Egg Throwing Championships
The World Egg Throwing Championships are built around a simple object with one inconvenient property: eggs break. Team events involve throwing and catching eggs, with distance becoming part of the challenge. That makes every successful catch a small exercise in precision and every failed one immediately visible. Could there be a sporting object better designed to announce your mistake? Unlike an egg-and-spoon race, the point here is not careful transportation. The egg actually has to fly.
14. World Poohsticks Championships
Drop a stick from one side of a bridge, wait for it to emerge downstream, and suddenly a childhood pastime has the bones of a race. The World Poohsticks Championships turned the stick-floating game inspired by the children’s stories into a genuine organized event with real rules. Its charm lies in how little equipment is necessary. No engine, ball, specialized shoes, or expensive gear is required. A bridge, moving water, and some strategically selected sticks are enough to produce a surprisingly competitive afternoon.
15. World Championship of Stone Skimming
Almost everyone who has stood beside calm water with a flat stone has considered giving it a throw. On Easdale in Scotland, that instinct becomes championship material. The World Championship of Stone Skimming applies formal rules to the familiar challenge, including requirements governing qualifying skips. The result feels unusually accessible for a world-level contest: the basic movement is recognizable, yet doing it exceptionally well requires technique. How many childhood distractions come with the possibility of becoming world champion?
16. World Championships of Shin-Kicking
The name leaves remarkably little mystery. Associated with the Cotswold Olimpick Games, shin-kicking has long historical roots, while the modern competition operates under controlled rules rather than simply inviting two people to attack each other’s legs. Competitors grapple while attempting to bring an opponent down using the distinctive shin-focused technique. It may look like an artifact from a much rougher sporting age, but its survival in a regulated modern format is exactly what makes it such a fitting finale to this list.
Human beings will apparently compete over almost anything once rules, spectators, and bragging rights enter the equation. What makes these contests memorable is not simply that they are strange. Many have become community traditions with established rules, charitable connections, or histories of their own. Somewhere between the cheese, gravy, bathtubs, toes, and imaginary guitars lies a wonderfully persistent idea: ordinary activities become much more interesting when somebody declares there will be a winner.
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