The World Nomad Games Are Back Where They Started and the Kok-Boru Final Is on Saturday Afternoon
Kyrgyzstan is staging the sixth edition, its first since 2018, with about 104 countries entered. Competitors wrestle on horseback, hunt with golden eagles and race over eleven kilometres.
The sixth World Nomad Games opened in Kyrgyzstan on 31 August with a ceremony at the new Bishkek Arena in front of about 30,000 people and 21 visiting heads of state, and the competition programme runs to Saturday 6 September. The kok-boru final is scheduled for the afternoon of the last day, from two o'clock until six, at the Kok-Boru Arena.
Kok-boru is the reason most people have heard of the Games. Two teams of riders wrestle a headless goat carcass away from one another at the gallop and throw it into a well-shaped goal called a tai kazan. Synthetic substitutes are now often used. It is the centrepiece of a programme that also includes er enish, in which two mounted men try to pull each other off their horses, salburun hunting with golden eagles, belt wrestling in the Kyrgyz kuresh and alysh styles, Turkish oil wrestling, mounted archery, tyiyn enmei, in which a rider picks a coin off the ground at full speed, the bone-throwing game ordo, and the board game toguz korgool. Horse races on the programme run over six, ten and eleven kilometres. Organisers list either forty-plus or forty-three disciplines depending on which of their own documents you read.
Kyrgyzstan invented the Games in 2014 at Cholpon-Ata, on the initiative of the philanthropist Askhat Akibaev and with the backing of the then president Almazbek Atambayev, and staged the first three editions. They then went to Iznik in Turkey in 2022 and Astana in Kazakhstan in 2024. This is the homecoming edition, and about 104 countries are entered, with more than 3,000 athletes, 517 of them Kyrgyz. Australia, New Zealand and Algeria are competing for the first time. The United Kingdom sent more than fifty athletes. Prizes reportedly include livestock and vehicles.
Events are spread across the Cholpon-Ata hippodrome, the ethno-town at Kyrchyn Gorge, the Rukh Ordo cultural centre and the Kurmanjan Datka Nomadic Civilization Center on Lake Issyk-Kul.
The scheduling was not an accident. The Games were timed to coincide with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, which is how the opening ceremony acquired an audience of presidents. The arena they sat in is not due to be formally opened until 5 October. Russia has said it is ready to host the seventh edition in Tatarstan in 2028.