Sports that originated in your part of the world (skateboarding, snow)
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The most popular team sport in Australia is football…Australian rules football. Outside Australia its pretty much confined to countries in the South West Pacific, so it’s not going to threaten soccer globally any time soon. But that hasn’t dimmed enthusiasm for it locally.
So what sports are there, well known or not, even quirky and obscure, that originated or evolved into a distinct variation of another sport, in your country?
Yeah, even if the northern states are in denial.
The international cup for AFL was just on. It's growing .... Slowly
The most popular team sport in Australia is football…Australian rules football. Outside Australia its pretty much confined to countries in the South West Pacific, so it’s not going to threaten soccer globally any time soon. But that hasn’t dimmed enthusiasm for it locally.
So what sports are there, well known or not, even quirky and obscure, that originated or evolved into a distinct variation of another sport, in your country?
aussie rules football owes its origins to gaelic football which is far and away the most popular sport in ireland ( prefer soccer myself though )
We have fierljeppen, which is a traditional Frisian sport:
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The sport involves a long pole and a body of water. The pole is between 8 and 13 m long and has a flat round plate at the bottom to prevent it from sinking into the muddy river or canal bottom.
A jump consists of a sprint to the pole (polsstok), jumping and grabbing it, then climbing to the top of the pole while trying to control its forward and lateral movements over a body of water, and finishing by landing on a sand bed opposite to the starting point.
In the region where I grew up (East Netherlands), klootschieten was quite a popular activity:
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Klootschieten ("Ball shooting" in English) is a sport in the Netherlands and East Frisia, Germany. In the game, participants try to throw a ball (the kloot) as far as they can. It is most popular in the eastern regions of Twente and Achterhoek.
Then there's also korfbal, which is quite a popular sport here. We played it a lot in school:
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Korfball (Dutch: Korfbal) is a ball sport, with similarities to netball and basketball. It has a mixed gender league and an all women league, but no all men league. It is played by two teams of eight players with either eight females in each team or with four females and four males in each team. The objective is to throw a ball through a bottomless basket that is mounted on a 3.5 m (11.5 feet) high pole.
The sport was invented by Dutch school teacher Nico Broekhuysen in 1902. In the Netherlands, there are around 580 clubs and over 100,000 people playing korfball. The sport is also very popular in Belgium and Taiwan, and is played in 54 other countries. Mixed gender korfball is more generally played in the north of the Netherlands, while all female korfball is generally played in the south of the Netherlands.
Other sports like field hockey, volleyball and speedskating are very big in the Netherlands (among the most popular sports) but not as widely played in many other countries. Since we call field hockey just "hockey" here, I believed for years that ice hockey was just some obscure version of it only played in places where it's permanently freezing so they can't play it on the field
We have fierljeppen, which is a traditional Frisian sport:
Went to watch a Fierljeppen contest when we were on holiday in Friesland, looked really fun!
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