The Indian sport of kabaddi is growing more popular in B.C.
Indian team sport that’s getting bigger, more professional in B.C. combines wrestling, rugby and tag
The collisions are fast and fierce, the athletes powerful and imposing, and the traditions run deep. Kabaddi, an Indian team sport, is getting bigger, more professional, and more popular in B.C.
The full-contact team game combines elements of tag, rugby and wrestling.
It’s played in one-day tournaments, like Sunday’s event in Surrey, which is expected to draw a crowd of more than 5,000 to the Surrey Bell Centre’s purpose-built kabaddi stadium.
Other tournaments in B.C. every summer include Vancouver Island, the Okanagan, Vancouver, and the upcoming Abbotsford tournament on Sept. 7.
The game is popular in the South Asian diaspora around the world, especially in Punjabi populations.
And there’s good money to the victors. Players can pull in $50,000 or $60,000 during a threemonth summer season in Canada, between B.C. and Ontario. The top prize at the annual Kabaddi World Cup in India is more than $300,000.
Each match features two teams on opposite halves of a circular playing field.
They take turns squaring off, one “raider” from one team, versus four “stoppers” on the other team.
If the raider can tag one of the stoppers and make it back to his half within 30 seconds, his team scores a point.
If the tagged stopper can pin, tackle, or otherwise stop the raider before he can make it back to halfway, the stopper’s team scores.
Outside of the South Asian community, B.C.’s most famous exkabaddi player must be Daniel Igali, the wrestler who won gold for Canada in the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
Igali picked up kabaddi in Surrey in 1995, shortly after he arrived from Nigeria.
Reached in Nigeria last month, Igali told the story of when he saw some Punjabi kids in 1995, tackling each other in a park in Surrey.
“After a while, I went and talked to them, and I said I wanted to play,” Igali said. “They kind of just laughed at me, like I wouldn’t be able to play.”
But Igali could play. He went on to become one of the first nonPunjabi kabaddi players in Canada, and one of the top raiders in the competition, playing in tournaments across Canada, India, the U.S., Australia and England.
“I had a lot of fun playing kabaddi … I had a different style,” Igali said. “Because of my style, because I was very fast, they called me ‘Toofan Singh’ — it means ‘Hurricane’ in Punjabi.”