Strange sports: Lingerie MMA, pizza acrobatics, lumberjack contests

In the 1989 movie “Say Anything,” a character played by John Cusack said he was into kickboxing, which he described as the “sport of the future.”
Of course, he was wrong. Kickboxing was popular for a while, but soon faded, overtaken by mixed martial arts.
It’s hard to predict what sports might be popular in the future. There certainly are a lot of wannabes.
I’ve written quite a bit about fringe sports over the years.
In my last post, I highlighted several geek sports leagues for video games, fighting robots, drone racing and robot car racing. Maybe one or more of those are sports of the future.
What follows are several goofy sports I’ve seen lately.

Lingerie Fighting Championships

After the Lingerie Football League (now called Legends Football League) burst on to the scene in 2009, there was an explosion of sexy women’s sports. It begat bikini and lingerie basketball and hockey, as well as copycat football leagues.
Lingerie Fighting Championships started in 2013. It features wrestling and MMA fighting by sexy women dressed in lingerie.

Pizza acrobatics

Pizza acrobatics is the skill of tossing of pizza dough in athletic and creative ways.
Pizza acrobats have two main opportunities every year to show off their skills and compete for the title of World Pizza Champion – at the World Pizza Championships in Italy, or the World Pizza Games, which are held during the annual Pizza Expo in Las Vegas, according to Atlas Obscura.

Lumberjack sports

Lumberjacks are some tough men and women and there are competitions worldwide to show off their skills in tree felling and sawing and axing through thick tree trunks.
In the U.S., there are the Lumberjack World Championships, held every July in Hayward, Wisconsin, and the Stihl Timbersports U.S. and world championships.

DodgeBow

DodgeBow is a sport that combines dodgeball and archery.
Up to 24 players compete in an arena with bows and arrows designed specifically for the activity. The arrows are topped with foam and reportedly hurt less than paintballs. If you get hit by an arrow, you’re out. The last team with archers still standing is the winner. The game starts with a “Hunger Games”-style dash for arrows.
The first DodgeBow Arena opened in Montreal.
A similar sport is Archery Tag, which has locations throughout the U.S.

Car curling

Last March, a bunch of crazy Russians created a new sport called car curling.
Instead of 40-pound granite stones and brooms, the game is played with Soviet-era cars known as Okas. Like in Olympic curling, the idea is to slide an object on ice closer to the center of a target than your opponent’s object. Those with the most points win.
(See articles by UPI, the Washington Post and the Daily Mail.)

Related reading:

Geek sports: Video games, fighting robots, drone races, more (Sept. 21, 2017)

Fringe sports, sexy sports, fake sports – a roundup (June 28, 2014)