Called the Elfstedentocht (or in English, the Eleven Cities Tour), the race is a roughly 200 kilometer trek across the frozen landscape and takes, at its fastest, over six hours. For the race to occur, the ice must be at least 15 centimeters thick throughout the course — which is rare. While the tradition of skating from city to city dates back to 1760, the race was not formalized until 1909. In the century-plus since, the Elfstedentocht has only taken place 15 times and not since 1997. [...]

If the race occurs in 2012, area officials expect as many as 15,000 skaters — and more than ten million viewers watching on television. Nearly 2 million fans will travel to the region as spectators — an absolutely enormous number given that the total population of the Netherlands is only about 17 million, and doubly so given that the race only occurs at sub-zero temperatures.

Link | News Story | Photo: Flickr user nikontino

(YouTube Link)

Back in the 1980s, the martial art Karate was all the rage among young and old, second only to the unattainable desire to be a Ninja. I took Karate classes, and so did almost every kid I knew, and even if there’d been actual Ninja training classes available I’m sure Karate would have remained every bit as popular, even though Ninja gear does look way cooler.

Everyone wanted to hit each other, break boards with their hands, and be like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid. So is it any wonder that this charmingly hilarious video, featuring a rap about Karate and lots of flashy moves, made a big splash back in the day? Enjoy this bit of retro kitsch, featuring some true Karate masters getting down.

–via Obvious Winner

Will Tazer Ball ever win the recognition that it deserves and become an Olympic sport? We don’t know. But even in the absence of that respect, members of the Toronto Terror and other teams will continue to bravely shock each other with underpowered tasers. So far, there are only four teams in the Ultimate Tazer Ball league. But the potential appeal of this sport is obvious.

Link -via The Agitator | Image: Ultimate Tazer Ball

Is that a woman dressed in a burka or ninja gear? Perhaps we shouldn't be suprised to find that thousands of Iranian women are now training to become ninjas.

From Oddity Central:

The Ninjustu school in Iran was started in 1989 by Sensei Akbar Faraji. This was the first time the martial art was introduced to the country. While the club now has over 24,000 members, the number of female participants is slowly on the rise. According to Faraji, in Ninjutsu, men are called ninjas, while women are addressed as kunoichi.

Link

Andy Lewis performed a slacklining routine during the Super Bowl halftime show, and amazed the audience. If slacklining is new to you, you can find out all about this extreme sport (or is it an art?) in an interview with climbing legend Dean Potter at National Geographic News Watch. Oh, yeah, that’s him in the picture, at Yosemite Falls. See a video of Potter’s trip across the abyss at NatGeo. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

If your face is freezing out on the slopes this winter, or you’re simply looking for a way to remain anonymous and look like a Viking warrior at the same time, then you need a Beardski. It’s a neoprene ski mask and an epic beard in one, and it comes in all kinds of styles and colors to suit your inner beard.

Link  –via TDW

Designed to work with the Össur Flex-Run blade, the Sole was a collaborative effort between Nike and triathlete Sarah Reinertsen. Like a normal running shoe, the Sole has an outsole and a midsole, and grips the carbon fiber blade with a material called Aeroply. Nike’s engineers even devised a clever system to secure the Sole to the blade, using an anchor and a rubber strip.

While it’s easy to dismiss this as either a cynical cash-in or an attempt to grab some good publicity, the Sole shows that a level of social acceptance and technological advancement where formerly insurmountable challenges now have consumer-grade solutions. I think we’re getting closer to the future, folks.

See a video of the shoe in action at Geekosystem. Link

The future of waste receptacle technology is here, and it has an LCD screen that can tell you how your stocks are doing today, how long it will take you to get home on public transit, and what the weather looks like for tomorrow.

It’s bombproof, offers a free Wi-Fi  connection, and it appears that the only thing that hasn’t improved is how it handles waste.

One hundred of these computerized trash bins are going to be placed in London’s financial district before the 2012 Olympic Games begin in July, so if you’re heading to London this summer you can stop by and say hi, then you’ll have a great story to tell your grandchildren!

Link

Do you watch the Super Bowl for the sports or the commercials? Back in the 1960s, a 30-second ad spot cost about $42,000. Now, it's $3.5 million, a whopping 8,300% increase. And something that costs that much money ought to be good, right?

This one above from 1973 is Noxzema's "Creamed" ad with football star Joe Namath and pre-"Charlie's Angels" Farrah Fawcett.

The Los Angeles Times has the timeline of the Best Super Bowl commercials through the years: Link

So, it's Super Bowl Sunday and you've gotten yourself invited to a football party but you know next to nothing about the sport or the two teams playing. What to do?

Don't worry, BuzzFeed has got your back! Here are some handy talking points if you found yourself amongst fans of either the New York Giants or the New England Patriots:

Read the rest over at Sly's post over at BuzzFeed: Link

Jen Yates has a roundup of cake wrecks celebrating the Super Bowl. Can you decipher the message on these cupcakes?

HINT: It’s starts with the word “gone.”

Both teams are represented equally in the collection at Cake Wrecks. Link

Championship games have champions, and champion t-shirts. But since we don’t know who that is until the championship game is over, championship shirts are printed for both teams, so they can be presented to the winning team immediately. It looks good on TV, you know. But what happens to the other shirts -the ones with the losing team’s name on them? They used to be incinerated, but that has changed over the years. Read all about it at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: Reuters/Oswaldo Rivas/Landov)

(YouTube Link)

The boxing world might have a furry new lightweight champ on its hands, in the form of this adorable boxing cat! It appears that he’s learned how to stick and move by watching fights on TV, and if this video is any indication of how he’ll perform in the ring this kitteh’s got some fierce moves!

–via Geekosystem

This Super Bowl commercial from Budweiser Canada features two recreational league hockey teams in Port Credit, Ontario. No, it’s not an original idea, but it is done well in this instance. The ad will not be broadcast in the U.S. so we have to show it to you here. -via Buzzfeed

“During most sporting events people will get up and use the restroom during the commercials and not have any problem,” said Dr. Jeff Kalina, associate medical director of emergency medicine at Methodist. “However, most of the time the commercials are the best part of the Super Bowl, so we have seen people who have to come in and have a catheter put in to relieve themselves.”

Super Bowl TV ads: Annoying and dangerous.

Methodist says “people who drink too much and fail to get up and go to the bathroom can also develop a problem called urinary retention, a condition where the bladder gets so full that the muscles are not strong enough to generate a stream.”

Link -via The Big Game

Whether you’re watching lacrosse, hockey, or golf, body checking always makes a sport more interesting. Here’s a Norwegian exhibition of soccer than incorporates this insight.

-via @JessFink

Are you a die-hard football fan? Are you a real Super Bowl fanatic? Then you should be able to name all the quarterbacks who won the Super Bowl in its 45-year history. In eight minutes. I named four of them, although one was a gimme. Anyone can do better! Link

Legolas is alive, and he’s a Russian woman named Iza Privezenceva. Watch her send arrows downrange about once a second and, as you can see at the end of the video, hitting her target most of the time.

-via Blame It on the Voices

(YouTube Link)

 YouTuber keef70 decided to use 3d and visual effects software to spice up his surf videos, and in my opinion he did a great job! Here’s what led to making this ambitious short:

I wanted to learn more about digital filming, formats, and editing and since I surfed, the GoPro seemed like a natural place to start. I figured after filming and editing a few vids I could move up to something like a Canon 7d, 5d, or the Nikon equivalent.

I got the idea for this after looking through all my footage and I’ve always been curious how effects artists match CG with filmed footage…

So I decided to figure out what software I needed and do it. That’s why it took me a year to do, because I was learning the software as I was doing it.

I could see this becoming a new trend in extreme sports videos, because nothing says extreme like explosions in the sky!

–via Geeks Are Sexy

What? Did you have to run track for PE? You poor thing!

15-year-old Sian Spence nominated indoor skydiving as her GCSE PE exam, and got it approved:

Her father, who works at the Computer Science Department at the University of Wales as a systems supporter. added: "Sian approached the school about doing it.

"This will be the first time anywhere in the UK that indoor skydiving will be assessed as part of a GCSE PE exam.

"We have suggested doing ten one-minute flights, all being assessed for levels of competence, and there will various aspects including testing a range of individual competencies, assessment of ability to deal with a changing environment, ability to deal with other fliers and an element of competition.

Link

Maxwell said men’s and women’s world record-holders, Ivan Scott of Ireland and Kerri-Jo Te Huia of New Zealand, showed the athleticism necessary to reach the top of world shearing.

“Ivan regained his world eight-hour solo lamb title by shearing 749 lambs, seven more than the previous world record,” she said.

“Kerri-Jo smashed the women’s eight-hour solo lamb shearing world record by shearing 507 lambs, 37 more than the previous record.”

To be accepted on the Olympic program, a sport first must be recognized by the International Olympic Committee by being widely practiced around the world and administered by an international federation that ensures that the sport’s activities follow the Olympic Charter.

Link -via MetaFilter | Photo: Flickr user NatalieMaynor

The newest members of the Baseball Hall of Fame are to be announced today. I found out that no player has ever been inducted with 100% of the votes tallied. But there have been 27 players who got 90% or more of the votes cast. How many of those players can you name? I could only name ten, and that was with a list of Hall-of-Famers and my husband’s help! Maybe you can beat the current average of 39%. Link

This is the most fascinating video that you will see all day, and possibly all week. Two champion cyclists try to be the fastest at this thousand-meter race by moving the slowest. In fact, the two competitors go so slowly that at the 3:38 mark, both come to a complete halt. Why? Dan Lewis explains:

The tactical advantage should be clear — the racer in the rear can make a sudden move when the front racer isn’t looking, catching the front racer flatfooted and therefore unable to catch up. But this advantage is moot if a cyclist believes he can simply outrace his opponent over the 1,000 meter course. That’s where aerodynamics come in. Vehicles in motion create slipstreams behind them — basically, rifts in the air similar to what a ship creates in the water. Other vehicles close behind them travel within this slipstream and get a benefit from it: they “draft” and experience less drag, and therefore need to expend less energy in order to go the same speed.

In the case of match sprints, this gives the trailing cyclist an enormous advantage. If the lead racer pushes it from the start, he will end up with only a slight lead with 200 or so meters to go — but his opponent will have much fresher legs. So in order to combat this, we get this weird do-si-do — on bicycles.

Link

National Geographic selected ten amazing people for their Adventurers of the Year. You can read about each one and then vote for your favorite to win the People’s Choice Award (through January 18th). One of those finalists is rider Danny MacAskill, whose stunt videos have gone viral over the past couple of years. Read more about him at NatGeo’s Intelligent Travel blog. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

Norway’s hockey team appears to have a secret weapon in the form of an invisible player! But no, that’s Ole Kristian Tellefsen, getting into a tussle with Finland’s Petteri Nokelainen last May. This strange picture is part of Sports Illustrated’s gallery of Pictures of the Year. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Imago/ZUMAPRESS.com)

The Cup of African Nations for Amputee Football (CANAF) concluded last month in Ghana, and Liberia won the tournament by defeating Ghana in the final game 4-2. Link -via Buzzfeed

(YouTube Link)

Most people born without arms would never dream of taking up archery, much less training to compete in the Paralympics, but then most people don’t have the drive that Matt Stutzman has in abundance.

Matt has never let his physical impairment stop him from doing anything he’s wanted to do, including playing guitar and learning to eat with his feet. He is an inspiration to us all, and should serve as a reminder that we can do anything we put our minds to, regardless of physical limitations.

Join me in wishing Matt luck as he gets ready for the 2012 Paralympic Games in London!

–via Super Punch

Brenda Hewlet had zero experience with hockey, and even had trouble walking out on the ice. But she still made a shot that would challenge master players. From 114 feet, she drove the puck into a hole that appeared to be about a inch wider than the puck itself. For this amazing performance, Ms. Hewlet won a new truck from a local Ford dealership.

-via Jalopnik

Although it has a long way to go from viral video to officially sanctioned Olympic sport, groin ball shows some promise. It’s played by four people in two teams. One grapples with an opponent while the two remaining players try to strike their opponents in the groin with tennis balls. When one player collapses to the ground in agony, his/her team has lost.

For those of you not athletically inclined, there are fantasy leagues.

Link

It’s none of the usual explanations: lots of scoring being better than endless nil-nil draws—I’ve been to cricket matches in which 1,000 runs were scored and you could hardly call them riveting. It’s not the hoopla or the sport-as-family-entertainment thing either which soccer fans accustomed to English hooliganism are supposed to appreciate. (Have you ever been to an Eagles game?)

Baseball fans will have to forgive me here, but the answer, I think, is that football is the quintessential American sport. It’s no accident it hasn’t really caught on elsewhere (the annual NFL game in London notwithstanding) whereas baseball and basketball have at least a claim to a global following and participation.

In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don’t mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework.

Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other’s brains out. It doesn’t get any more beautiful than that.

Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: AP

One critical difference: the umpire has a halberd and is willing to use it. The Ghistelles Hours, a Fourteenth Century Flemish devotional manuscript, contains illustrations of people playing something that scholar Carl Pyrdum describes as baseball. But I think that it sounds like cricket:

Though there’s no base in sight, various historians of sport have identified this game as a version of “stool ball” or “stump ball”, which was baseball played with only one base, where the object was for the pitcher to hit a stump or a stool or other handy protrusion with the ball while the batter protected it by batting away the pitcher’s balls. Each player stood on or near what was essentially a “base” If the batter made contact, he was expected to run around the pitcher’s base and back to his own. Various fielders could catch the batted ball and throw the ball at the stool while the batter is occupied running.

Link -via Retronaut | Photo: Walters Art Museum

These guys take extreme risks with pogo sticks, doing things I would never endorse -but I will watch! They were filmed over several month’s time by GoPro cameras from various angles. The result is entertaining, but maybe should carry a vertigo warning. -via BroBible

Doctors have no explanation for her amazing recovery. Some believe the trauma of her last accident may have jolted her body back into activity.

But the realities of her new-found joy also put an immediate end to a successful athletic career.

“Although walking is the best thing you could do in life, I immediately missed the sport, the people and the challenges,” van der Vorst said.

Rehabilitation and physiotherapy with an athletic focus strengthened her and as soon as she sat on a bike she again wanted to give it a try.

But van der Vorst has a new goal. She has signed with a professional cycling team as an able-bodied athlete, and is training to compete in the 2016 Olympics. Link -via Buzzfeed, where you can see more pictures.

(Image credit: Bas Czerwinski/AP)

The marathon is brutal enough as it is normally conducted. Remember that Pheidippides, the first marathon runner, died at the end. Now imagine completing one in sub-zero temperatures through the snow. That’s what thirty-six runners did at the Union Glacier Antarctic base camp. The winner, Clément Thévenet, finished the race in three hours and forty-seven minutes.

Link (warning: auto-sound) | Previously: North Pole Marathon

An LSU cheerleader wore a GoPro camera during the November 25th LSU-Arkansas football game. Be warned that she is a “flyer,” one of the smaller cheerleaders who stand on top of the pyramids, so this might make you dizzy. It might also make you rethink allowing your daughters to try out for the team. -via BroBible

In Japan, snowball fighting isn’t just a pleasant winter pastime. It’s a serious competitive sport known as Yukigassen or “snow battle.” Two teams square off on a field about the size of a hockey rink. Victory comes through annihilating the other team or capturing its flag. See more photos and a video at the link. This particular photo, I should note, is from a match in Alaska, not Japan.

Link | Photo: Roy Neese, Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau

No snow? No problem for these hardcore skiers. They simply ski on rocks:

The warmest weather in half a century means that many European ski resorts are without snow later in the year than any time in recent memory. Some, dedicated skiers are turning to rocks to get their fix.

In Europe, there's a shortage of snow this winter.

That's meant people in Austria have had to come up with another way to get in their skiing fix. They turned to rocks.

"At the moment we're having problems because it's too cold to make artificial snow and real snow hasn't started falling yet," said one Austrian skiier, who'd just come down a rock quarry.

Link

A bridge, a speedboat, and Brodie Smith. That's what it takes to make the world's most insane frisbee trick catch.

Check it out: Hit play or go to YouTube [Link]

A school in São Paulo, Brazil trains people who are visually impaired — many completely blind since birth — to be graceful and coordinated ballet dancers. Fernanda Bianchini opened her school in 1995 and developed an effective way of teaching dance by touch to hundreds of students. A few of her students have even become professional dancers.

-via Oddity Central | Previously: Super Mario Bros. Ballet

The Florida Marlins are now the Miami Marlins. The baseball team got a new logo to go with their new name. They are also getting a new ballpark. But what’s that structure over behind the center field wall? It’s a home run celebration feature. When the Marlins score a home run, this is going to light up like this:

(YouTube link)

It’s supposed to have a lot of sound, too. As Grant Brisbee of Baseball Nation says,

We’re not here just to make fun of the Marlins.

Except when we have no choice. Which, again, it looks like we don’t. There’s no way around this one, again.

Link -via Metafilter

Witt, a 22-year-old senior from Wylie, Texas, has a scheduling conflict next Saturday. At about the same time he’s expected to lead Yale in his career finale against visiting Harvard in the 128th edition of “The Game,” Witt is also supposed to be at Emory University in Atlanta as one of 212 finalists for the Rhodes Scholarship. His interview in front of a selection committee is Saturday morning. Kickoff is at noon. The interview can’t be rescheduled. This is a problem—albeit a good problem.

The NFL is looking at Witt, who leads his team in completions and is second in passing yards. He also has a 3.91 GPA, which is rare for a star athlete. What would you do? Link -via TYWKIWDBI

After you think about it, see what Witt has decided to do. Link

(Image credit: Ron Waite, Photosportacular)

Rip Curl has again created a technological world-first by capturing full-tilt surfing action using a “30 camera Array” — a line of cameras firing consistently as surfers ride towards and past it. The results are unique “frozen moments of time” – that can be viewed in a combination of angles for a true in the round perspective.

There’s also a behind the scenes clip available.

Via Winextra.

If your team is going to have a mascot, it has to be one that connects with people. That’s why there was a movement by Ole Miss to adopt Admiral Ackbar. ‘Cause when you think of Mississippi, you naturally think of the Admiral. It’s a common association.

And that brings us to hockey. What creatures to you associate with hockey? Wookiees, of course! So the Port Huron hockey team The Fighting (Millennium) Falcons adopted Chewbacca as its mascot for one night.

Link -via The Mary Sue

You go, girl! This 600 meter sprint was part of the 2008 Big Ten Indoor Track and Field Championships. Heather Dorniden of Minnesota went into the race as the favorite, but the odds changed along the way. -via TYWKIWDBI

It took Singh over eight hours to cross the finish line — more than six hours after Kenya’s Kenneth Mungara won the event for the fourth straight year — and he was the last competitor to complete the course. But his time wasn’t nearly remarkable as the accomplishment itself. [...]

Sunday’s run was Fauja Singh’s eighth marathon — he ran his first at the tender age of 89 — and wasn’t the first time he set a record. In the 2003 Toronto event, he set the mark in the 90-plus category, finishing the race in five hours 40 minutes and one second.

Link -via Daily Telegraph (warning: auto-sound) | Photo: Frank Gunn/Canadian Press

If I say the words "pole dancing," what image comes to your mind? Scantily-clad women gyrating on a pole?

Helloooo! It's the twenty first century, people - where's your sense of gender equality? Thankfully, a small group of (very agile) men are out to change the image of pole dancing:

Spinning upside down around a tall silver rod here last weekend, an Australian fellow named Matty Shields stared down a panel of women judges, a mainly female crowd and decades of stereotypes. He hoped to become a gender pioneer: the world's first official king of pole dancing.

Mr. Shields, 26 years old, was one of seven men who were the first male competitors in the annual World Pole Dance finals. In a white vest festooned with feathers, ripped open to expose his chest, Mr. Shields wooed a skeptical crowd with moves like "the body flag," in which he gripped the pole with his hands and stretched his body out horizontally.

With its roots in strip clubs and bedrooms, pole dancing has been dismissed as a misogynistic playground in which women contort themselves for the viewing pleasure of men. But lately some women have fought to transcend titillation by rebranding it as fitness. Some have even petitioned the International Olympic Committee to make it an Olympic sport.

Link

Saltman made the shot from the par-3 third hole at El Encin Golf Hotel. Heavily cured and salted ham is a Spanish delicacy.

“I’ve been trying to lose weight, but now I’m thinking I should have just kept it,” Saltman said.

Ham was the prize offered for a hole-in-one at the third — prizes on other holes included a car and a watch.

Ah, pork. Now there‘s an incentive (hint, hint, Alex)!

Link -via Geekosystem | Photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images

Hey caddy, my ball went into the water. Be a good sport and go in and get it, would you?

Well, maybe not at the Carbrook Golf Club in Brisbane, Australia, where half a dozen bullsharks live in the lake. They took up residence a few years ago when a nearby river flooded, and have been breeding since then. Some of the sharks are up to ten feet long. They’ve become quite an attraction, so groundskeepers feed them to encourage them to come near the shore. Watch a video of the sharks at the link.

Link -via Dave Barry

A short while later, with five minutes to play in the third quarter, Amat was called to the same field to attempt a 31-yard field goal. She split the uprights.

The kick proved decisive as Pinckney held on for a 9-7 victory against a Grand Blanc team that had come into the game ranked seventh in the state in its division. It also earned Amat the nickname the Kicking Queen.

The twin accomplishments were still sinking in Monday, said Amat, a senior who has played soccer since she was 3 but who tried out for the football team only last spring, at her soccer coach’s suggestion.

“It’s just starting to hit me today,” she said in a telephone interview. “The guys were congratulating me, but without them, I wouldn’t even have gotten close” to making the kick.

Amat, who maintains a 4.0 GPA and is active in student government, is the first female to make the school’s varsity football squad. Link -via Breakfast Links

(Image credit: Stephen McGee for The New York Times)

If you’re interested, you can sign the petition at the link. If not, well, it probably won’t happen anyway, so don’t do anything.

Link