Hello g1s, it's time for another blog!

To the few of you who keep track, my Video Games Rock blog is coming soon.  I just have to wait for work to stop attempting to kill me and to get permission to upload some stuff so that you get a better experience.

Anyway!  Back to the premise of this blog.  As it turns out our friends in the land of crumpets, posh accents, and unecessary "u"s in words have created what is likely the most manly and painful sport in existence: Shin kicking.  If you're like me then the only time you think of that is when you play Street Fighter and your opponent finds out that they can be a cheap bastard by turtling in a corner and spamming low kick.  But this fine sport predates the game by a couple centuries (and is a bit more interesting to boot [see what I did there? {woah, parentheception}])

I found out about this particular sport the other morning when I turned on my TV as I ate breakfast.  When that story came on I found out the hard way that Cheerios can't go through your nose from laughing no matter how hard they try.  As America is beginning to catch Olympic Fever, the morning news shows thought it would be interesting to talk about the OTHER Olympic games in England: the Cotswold Olimpick Games. 

Old school enough for ya?  Huh?!

The whole idea of those games was started in the mid-17th Century and was meant to get people more active for the good of the country; how this is done by having a sport that breaks everyone's legs is beyond me but I digress.  One of the original events was wrestling; however, due to the way that everyone played, the game turned into a sport where you kick the crap out of the other guy's shins until he collapsed on the ground.  As the games evolved, so did the competition.  Soon competitors were training by hitting their shins with hammers and they would wear steel-toed shoes to the games when they competed.  Now it may just be me, but at a certain point a governing body should look at that and say, "That guy's leg is shattered, should we make having metal in your shoes illegal?"

These days the games are a bit more tame than they used to be.  Instead of steel-toed shoes, you have to wear soft-soled shoes.  Instead of bearing the pain (I'd almost want to be kicked in the nuts before I got kicked in the shins honestly), you get to stuff your pants and socks with as much hay as you can possibly stuff in.

Hay aside that STILL looks damn painful.

The basic premise of the game is to grab your opponent by their collar and to perform a combination of shin-kicks and leg sweeps to get your opponent to the ground.  A match is best two out of three against an opponent.  Oddly enough the people interviewed about the sport said it was mostly about your balance...and a high capacity for pain.  This was definitely evident when the reporter who tried it got forced back about eight feet before having his legs swept out from under him and crashing on the ground like a sack of potatoes.

Before you say that no one would ever watch something like that, let me drop another bomb shell.  Each year the Cotswold Olimpick Games sees attendence in the thousands.  So not only will you be limping off with bruised shins but thousands of people (more if they tape it and put it up online) will see it happen to.  But don't worry too much about it, paramedics are always standing by.

Oh, and the other events of the Games include tug-of-war, dwile flonking (dancing around a team throwing a bear-soaked cloth), judo, piano smashing, and poetry.  Yeah.  The last one kinda took me by surprise too.

What is this...I don't even...Dwile what?

I just thought I'd share that with you g1s out there.  If there are any g1s out there who are familiar with this then I'd love to hear about it in the comment section below.  As for the rest of us, now when you see a friend of yours showing no skill at Street Fighter as he turtles away, you can tell him about this fascinating sport...then destroy him while he's distracted!!

-Caboose