Elephant football
Nepal was already home to the tallest mountain on Earth, but now it can boast something even better than that: elephant football. There’s definitely a running theme to the annual Chitwan Festival, 150 miles from Mount Everest. Among the activities at the five-day event are elephant walks, elephant polo, elephant painting, an elephant picnic and, intriguingly, an elephant beauty contest. Basically, the Nepalese love an elephant. It was only a matter of time, then, until someone came up with the bright idea of giving them a football and watching them play.
Elephant football began in 2008 and has really caught on, attracting a crowd of 20,000 this year – more than Lazio’s average gate in Rome.
Baby elephants from the nearby national park are trained by riders, or mahouts, for a couple of months before the big match. Each team has four elephants, with lots drawn to decide the line-ups. There’s a keeper, defender, midfielder and forward.
Each half lasts for 15 minutes, with makeshift bamboo goalposts at each end of a half-sized football pitch. The elephants are controlled by their riders as they boot a standard-sized football around the field. Some serious tactics are on show: the elephants are taught to kick the ball and use their trunks to nudge it in the right direction. They’re even trained to block passes and use their bodies to push their opponents, keep possession and control the play.
“As you would imagine, they don’t have football brains, so to speak,” Suman Ghimire, the coordinator of Chitwan Festival, tells Fourfourtwo, “but they can pick up some basic tactics – for instance, when to kick the ball and also when to defend.”
FFT is imagining an elephant version of catenaccio at this point: 1-0 up, shut up shop and park all of the elephants in front of the goal. But we’re possibly getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.
The younger pachyderms are the quickest, racing through a defence. “We use the word quick in a pretty relative way,” Ghimire stresses. “As, they can’t run, it is walking quickly, kicking the ball and then chasing.”
And is there a Cristiano Ronaldo of the elephant world? Of course, there is: it’s the four-year-old Kush Bahadur, a forward who’s been ‘elephant of the match’ in each of the last two fixtures, banging in an impressive three goals.
“He’s the best one we have,” Ghimire adds. “The team that has Kush as its forward will win more often than not.”
Don’t try to kick KB7 off the park, though, because he’ll hold a grudge. After all, an elephant never forgets.