"It has been a madness": from Osona to the Nomad Games of Kyrgyzstan for an African board game
Jordi Solé explains his experience after participating in a competition that has a decade of life and that counts on surprising tests
Saint Michael of Balenyà"It has been a unique experience, a madness, a wonder," states Jordi Solé (Sant Miquel de Balenyà, Osona, 1999) upon returning from Kyrgyzstan. He went there to participate in the World Nomad Games. It is a competition recognized by UNESCO that was born in 2014 to preserve, project, and claim the cultural and recreational heritage of nomadic peoples, their identity. There is no soccer, basketball, or conventional disciplines, but rather a unique list of activities, sports, and ethnic and traditional games, such as races to build yurts or break bones, wrestling or archery on horseback or the kok-boru, a kind of polo with a decapitated and quartered goat as a ball.
Solé has a travel agency-blog with a friend, Víctor López, and two years ago they discovered the existence of the World Nomad Games by chance on social media. "We said: 'Damn, we have to go to the next edition as journalists.' We tried, but we hit a dead end. They asked us for papers that we didn't know how to get. We contacted the Kazakh House, the organization that manages the Spanish team, and they told us it would be difficult as journalists, but that if we were interested they were looking for participants," he recalls laughing.
"We said yes, but that we didn't want to go to fight against a 300-kilo giant, and they told us that there were also intellectual games," adds Solé. Oware, a board game from Ghana, was the easiest entry point. They began training in June, through a mobile app and a website. In the summer, Solé went on vacation to Senegal and bought two boards. They would meet to train among themselves: no one else knew the game. "When I started explaining that we were going to the Games, they would tell me what that was, what had I gotten myself into, why was I doing such strange things, and where was Kyrgyzstan. 'Surely there is a war there,'" he continues.
An inaugural parade with Putin in the royal box
The opening ceremony took place on August 31st, coinciding with the 35th anniversary of the country's independence, formerly part of the USSR. They marched before more than 30,000 people and around twenty heads of state and government, with wide-eyed amazement. Vladimir Putin was there; António Guterres, UN Secretary-General; the Indian Prime Minister... "It was a spectacular day. I get goosebumps just remembering it. We were told that filming was prohibited, but halfway through the parade, I took out my phone. It's one of those things that happens once in a lifetime," he says.
"We met people from many different places. I spoke with people from Turkmenistan whom I will never see again because they can barely leave their country. The most beautiful thing was that Iranians or Russians were shaking hands and hugging Americans, and Afghans were taking photos with unveiled women from Pakistan. You see that war, in the end, is not a thing of the people," he points out. Standing there in the middle, I felt a certain imposter syndrome. A few weeks earlier, they didn't even know the sport that had brought them to the Games.
"The only shitty thing was representing Spain, but we did that very little. We spoke to everyone about Catalonia and explained to them that there is a conflict here and that we are not Spanish," he asserts. The Spanish delegation had more than forty participants, with half a dozen Catalans: one in horse archery, one in arm wrestling, and four in oware, a board game like chess or checkers. It is played with a board and 48 seeds. The discipline had 64 participants and Solé was 32nd. His partner finished fifteenth after facing rivals like a prince from Nigeria.
Kyrgyzstan, the country that promoted the World Nomad Games, was the delegation with the most medals, but Kazakhstan took the top spot in the medal table by number of golds. In the first edition, in 2014, 500 athletes from nineteen countries participated, basically from Central Asia, and this sixth one has reached 3,000 athletes in more than forty disciplines and one hundred countries. "At first they were Nomad Games for nomad countries, but then they opened it up to everyone because they were interested in internationalizing it as much as possible to bring in more tourism from abroad. It is growing exponentially," highlights Solé.
They took pictures with one of the world stars of the tug-of-war game: "An Iranian giant who was 2.10m tall and weighed 190 kilos. We went to greet him and he explained to us that he was a Barça fan." They also saw a game of a kind of bocce with animal bones and some match of kok-boru, the polo with a decapitated and quartered goat. It is the most popular sport and also the one that has centralized the criticism for animal abuse: "From a Western point of view you would say that that is not right, but we are nobody to go around giving lessons." He is already counting the days for the 2028 edition, in Russia.