We drove from Bishkek to the resort area of Cholpon-Ata on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul for a two day stay. This was an outing in the Lake Issyk-Kul area. While Kyrgyzstan is a modern country, it still has farming areas and those areas still feel a strong connection to their past nomad days. I suppose it’s like rodeos in the US, even though we don’t have very many true cowboys left today.

We were treated to a game of “drop the goat” which is the Kyrgyz national sport. The game almost had an air of watching Genghis Khan and some marauding Mongolians swooping in to raid and pillage a village. It’s sort of like nomad polo, only with a dead goat for the ball. The goat gets killed and beheaded right before the game begins. That part is like a spiritual ritual. The goat is like the ball or the puck or whatever it is that you use to score points. I’ll walk you through the game with my photos.

First, you can see the two teams in the first photo. In this game there were five players on either team. The game, however, can be played with many more players on a team, even many dozen on each side.

But first, they demonstrated several other games. Each team takes turns trying to pick up some small objects on the ground at a full gallop. This is the second photo. After this, they had some sort of one-on-one wrestling on horseback where each rider tried to pull or push the other rider off his horse. I know these are different games but perhaps they use them like warmups.

The Drop the Goat game began when the referee dropped the goat on the ground. The dead goat weighs usually between forty and seventy-five pounds, so it’s not an easy pickup. And as you can see in the third photo, a player doesn’t just get to ride up and pick up the goat. Players from both teams are creating interference for their team or trying to block the other players away from the goat. It reminded me a lot of a rugby scrum, only on horseback.

When a player finally does pick up the goat, then he gets attacked from all sides by opponents trying to rip the goat away. His own team tries to fend off the opposing riders. You can see some of this action in the fourth photo. But eventually, someone from one team drops the goat into a large cylinder, perhaps three feet high and twenty feet across, that has a much smaller container inside it. The goat must end up in the small container inside the larger container to count as a point. It’s not easy to toss a sixty pound dead goat, so the player really has to get close and the opponents don’t make that easy.

The winning team gets the goat for a feast to their triumph. The last photo concerned me. I hadn’t realized that Vicky wasn’t sitting next to me when I saw her down with the players. I wasn’t sure if she was congratulating the yellow team on their victory or trying to steal the goat.