Oil Wrestling is Turkey's Full-Contact, Messy National Sport

 

This may look like an orgy, but it’s actually a sport.

In a match of Oil-wrestling, Turkey’s national sport, there’s no penalty for holding. 

 

In fact, the entire game revolves around participants fighting to get their hands down each other’s pants. But, first the well-sculpted men must douce themselves with olive-oil to make their skin glisten while they play, or possibly just to protect against the heat.

  

(A Bulgarian oil wrestler, known as pehlivan, prepares on September 30, 2012 for the start of a traditional oil wrestling competition near the village of Cherna, some 410 kms east of Sofia. The tournament aims to revive an old tradition of oil wrestling, which is also popular in Turkey in the Balkans.) 

 

Each fighter wears a pair of lovely black-hand-stitched lederhosen-looking pants called a kispet. Once the game begins, fighters attempt to pin one another down, with the goal of getting a good hold on the kispet. Don’t worry though, the rules say you cannot grab an opponent’s balls or invade his rectum. Whew!

 

The first fighter to have their "umbilicus exposed to heaven"  loses the match, according to the Turkish Wrestling rules.

You must keep that umbilicus under wraps.
Close to 1,000 athletics compete during the three-day elimination tournament.

Scroll through the gallery for some impressive slip-ups.  

In Kirkpinar wrestling, contestants are drenched in olive oil from head to toe, are stripped to the waist, and wear specially designed leather trousers. The one-on-one combats staged every summer closely resemble the first ones held nearly 650 years ago.Three tons are of olive oil are consumed each year.