Cock fighting in the Philippines

    On a hill overlooking the small town of Banaue in northern Luzon sits a rickety shack, cobbled together with random timber left-overs and a corrugated iron roof. Improvised wooden seating around two sides of a hard packed, dirt floor arena hold an eager crowd of local men, anticipating today’s action in the cockpit, as the cock fighting space is known. Naturally there’s more to the event than just the sport, or Sabong as it’s known here, it’s a…

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Equestrian hardcore in Uzbekistan

If you thought that equestrian sports were for upper class twits and the nearest the working classes should get to them is putting a tenner on the 3 30 at Chepstow then you ought to get yourself to Central Asia. Here in Uzbekistan, kupkari, the local variant of the traditional, regional game more commonly known as Buzkashi, is a sport for real men, on the kind of tough horses, which, if in England, would probably call your horse a poof,…

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