Only in Russia can you see a game as simple and easy as curling be taken this far. But in this game hosted in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg, the normal stones sliding across the ice have been replaced with cheap and fragile Okas cars.
The principal, surprisingly, remains pretty much the same. Four teams of 10 players take turns guiding the car along as they make their way towards the marked lines that would signify their defeat or victory. A driver inside the car steers it straight once the other nine let go. As you would expect, a lot of crashing happens.
Luckily, the Okas cars are considered junk, and those driving them are not among the 43% of people financing their vehicles, or else this game could’ve ended up being much more expensive than it was worth.
The winning team gains the U.S. equivalent of around $1,600. And, if the vehicles were not considered junk cars and the damages actually had to be paid for, that surely wouldn’t cover all the dents and bumps all these cars got during this game.
Surprisingly, though, the organizer of the event, Galina Kirkach, said there is a method to the madness of using cars instead of the traditional stones.
“We constantly see accidents on the road, and we thought that this would attract people’s attention to the need for insurance,” Kirkach says.
This isn’t the first time cars have been combined with a sport they have no business in. A video game called Rocket League, in which cars are inserted into a game of soccer, has gained a massive amount of popularity since it’s release. Recently, they have just passed the milestone of around 10.5 million copies sold.
It’s unclear why cars are starting to appear in sports that never included them to begin with. Maybe it’s a testament to a generation of people constantly thinking outside the box for the next inventive, if somewhat silly, thing. However, it’s not recommended to try either of these sports in cars without proper training and very good insurance.