Return to main articleWorld’s Strangest Sports
Wall of Death, India
Fasten your seatbelts. This national sport requires only a barrel-shaped track and drivers with nerves of steel. Popularized by American carnivals in the 1920s and exported shortly after, this man-versus-gravity spectacle has been embraced by citizens of the subcontinent ever since. Drivers race cars and motorbikes inside the near-vertical barrel, nonchalantly climbing out of windows, sitting on roofs, and riding bikes without hands (back in the day, some even went so far as to pop a bear or lion in the sidecar). The winner, of course, is anyone who manages to survive.
