#kokpar

The most decorated athlete in all of Kazakhstan is a five-year-old Mongolian horse named Lazer. Born wild on the steppe, he lacks the lean grace of a thoroughbred or an Arabian. Except for his large head and broad front haunches, he is small enough to be mistaken for a pony. His coat is a dusty black, tinged with rust, and his unkempt mane hangs punkishly over his eyes. Short-legged, small-eared, with aloof, walnut eyes, he might be any one of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of horses ranging over the grasslands of this enormous, wide-open country.

In the ancient nomadic game known as kokpar (roughly, “goat-grabbing”), Lazer is a champion many times over, with eight Kazakh National Games and two Central Asian Games titles to his name. Kokpar’s premise is simple: two teams take to a chalked-out 200-metre field to compete over a headless, freshly slaughtered goat, wrestling control back and forth in an attempt to score by flinging it into the opponent’s goal. Lazer has been trained for the game from an early age, learning to evade or dig in against much larger defensive horses. In fierce face-offs and chaotic scrums, it’s often a wonder that Lazer’s rider – a thickset, windbeaten man named Abdijaparov Abugali – can even hold on, let alone swing his body down Lazer’s flank in a headfirst lunge for the trampled goat carcass around which the horses stamp and circle.

Kokpar is said to have originated with Genghis Khan’s early-13th-century mounted raiders, although it may be even older. Traditionally, it was played between villages. The field of play was the distance, often miles, between two nomadic encampments; the goals a garden or animal pen in each. Matches would typically follow a wedding or the birth of a child, with 50 or 100 men and boys on horseback coming together in a pell-mell of sweat and blood, of grunting riders and rearing horses. The game is still played (or perhaps recreated) this way across central Asia, on the same occasions and on national holidays, but in recent years it has become increasingly professionalised, with federations and government ministers responsible for its promotion. There are now salaries for players and televised matches. And, of course, there are stars, none brighter than the one before me, calmly nipping the grass and sniffing the air on a chilly April morning at the hippodrome on the outskirts of Taldykorgan, a small industrial city in eastern Kazakhstan.  ...