Today is the start of Mongolia’s most famous sports competition- the yearly multi-day Naadam Festival and we will be going to the opening ceremony. The festival, in one form or another, dates back to the days of Genghis Khan. It consists of three major sports: archery, wrestling and horse racing. We will have a opportunity to view all three in the next two days.

The opening ceremony is held at the 20,000 seat sports stadium in Ulaanbaatar where we have reserved seats waiting for us. We arrived at the stadium several hours before the opening ceremony (scheduled for noon) so we could wander around and view some of the competitions that had already begun-men and women’s archery and an unusual men’s competition called “knuckle bone shooting”.

I was amazed at the skill of the archers. Men aimed at small cylindrical targets 75 meters away (women shot from 60-65 meters) and scored highly time after time. It is colorful and the skill level is astounding.

Knuckle bone shooting may be the most unusual sport I have ever seen. It is a team-based sport where domino shaped tablets are “flicked” at a target of real sheep knuckle bones with the goal of knocking them down-like the old carnival game of throwing balls at a row of dolls. We sat in a large hall watching dozens of teams (men only) compete in this most unusual sport where they loudly urged their teammates as they launched their tablets at the target located a good 10-15 feet away.

We then were marched into the stadium we were had rock star seats, located initially in the shade. However, before the two hour event was over we found ourselves seated in the hot, noon day sun! Smart people brought umbrellas to seek some degree of shade.  The two hour pageant has all the trappings of a musical spectacular-music, dancing, racing horses and elaborate costumes galore. It is the equivalent of the opening of the Olympics soon to be held in Paris. The opening ceremony was as elaborate as any I have seen in the USA. It was quite a spectacle and included the appearance of the famous Mongolian rock band- the Hu! The pictures I was able to take do not do justice to the spectacle we saw. You had to be there to appreciate it.

Immediately after the two hour show the wrestling competition began and we watched part of that spectacle. It is a big deal. 512 or 1024 men compete in a single elimination contest to hopefully become the ultimate champion. The winner receives a free apartment and fancy car, so it is a big deal to win. And, oh, by the way, age categories are not involved. Matches rarely last more than a few minutes but the overall contest takes up to two days to complete. A wrestler must win 9-10 matches to be the champion and they become national heroes.

After a late lunch in a nearby restaurant we toured the Bogd Khan Palace museum complex, built between 1893 and 1903, and  dedicated to the head of Mongolian religion at the time  and who claimed independence from China. It was a short era of a theocracy in Mongolia. The complex includes seven prayer temples and the winter palace of the Bogd Khan.

It was a long day and we headed back to the hotel to prepare for leaving in the morning.

Tomorrow we will view the completion of the famous horse race and start our tour of the rest of Mongolia.