HEADLES GOAT ROMPS
EXPERT HORSEMANSHIP AND THE WARRIOR CODE LIVE ON IN CENTRAL ASIA
While the modern sport of polo has its origins in northeastern India — from where the British military adopted the game and spread it around the world in the late 19th century — the real provenance of polo lies in the vast panoramas of Central Asia.
Mounted nomads played ancient variants of the sport — which, like the modern game, became gentrified with its adoption by royalty and the elite of society — in Persia and Byzantium, in Tang-dynasty Xi’An and in northern Pakistan. It was here, in 1996, that I saw my first game, in the polo ground at Gilgit on the Karakoram Highway, played by dashing dandies with Errol Flynn moustaches and riding breeches, and cheered enthusiastically by a large crowd of men in shalwar-kameez.
More whimsical modern takes on the game include Thai elephant polo and Mongolian camel polo (played on Bactrians), both based on modern polo rules.
But one ancient variant never became gentrified and is played to this day across the enormous dramatic sweep of Central Asia: buzkashi, or headless-goat polo. Also known as kok-boru, this brawl on horseback is played in the deserts of Afghanistan, on the steppes of Kazakhstan and in the high pastures of Xinjiang. It’s played under the dramatic peaks of Tajikistan and in the fastnesses of the Altay mountains. And it’s played in Kyrgyzstan, where I watch it at the World Nomad Games in 2018.
The games feature a riotous set of activities such as eagle hunting, archery, wrestling and horsemanship, held mainly at a jailoo (high pasture) in the Tienshan Mountains, but the kok-boru is the main draw, staged at a specially built arena on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. I’m at Altay vs Mongolia and, to me, watching from the stands, it looks like a free-for-all as first one team then the other wrests control of a 35kg headless goat and tries to deposit it in a kazan or scoring circle at each end of the playing field, which is about the size of two football pitches laid end-to-end. But this blithe description belies the sheer brutality of the game as players crash into their opponents, striking them and their horses with whips or even gripping the whip in their teeth to free both hands for mounted wrestling, the battered carcass hooked under a thigh. “Boring game,” says my Kyrgyz neighbour. “These guys don’t know how to ride our horses. They whip too hard.”
I can’t wait to see an exciting game.