Sweat, blood, the warm smell of horse excrement. Those are the three fundamental elements that register as I watch the United States getting roundly battered by Kazakhstan at the sport of kok boru. The game is an archaic form of polo in which riders fight for possession of an 80-pound goat carcass. Horses ram into one another, players are knocked to the ground and almost trampled, a scrum of frothing equine heads, gnashing teeth, and shouting ensues until one rider breaks free, holding the carcass under his leg, and gallops toward a large rubber ring into which he flings it. Score: 1–0 for Kazakhstan.
The American team is led by Scott Zimmerman, who runs a land-management business in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He and his team of “nomad cowboys” have been diligently flying out from the U.S. to compete at kok boru for years. They’ve never had much success, but this year seems particularly rough. Zimmerman comes off his horse and is dragged in the dirt with his foot caught in his stirrup. Soon it’s 15–0, and there’s a mocking announcement that a Kazakh businessman has offered the Americans 20,000 tenge (about $40) if they can score just one point. They don’t. The game ends 18–0 to cheers from the crowd. The most powerful country in the world has been comprehensively defeated.
The match was part of the 5th World Nomad Games, a veritable steppe Olympics, that took place last month. Some 2,500 athletes from 89 different nations—including such non-nomadic outliers as Sri Lanka, Sweden, and Madagascar—gathered to compete in sports such as horseback wrestling, competitive falconry, and ordo, a kind of huge game of marbles using cow bones. Previously the games took place in rural regions, but this year they were in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana. A makeshift nomadic village was erected between the Grand Mosque— it’s a Muslim-majority country—and three huge decommissioned space rockets, a reminder of Russia’s long history in the region.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, other aspiring powers began jockeying for influence. Among the Central Asian dignitaries at the games’ opening ceremony was Bilal Erdoğan, the son of Recep Erdoğan, the Turkish president. Bilal is a figure of fun in his homeland, rather like Donald Trump Jr. There’s a saying in Istanbul that’s used when you want something explained simply: “Tell me like I’m Bilal.” But in his speech here, as the president of the World Ethnosport Confederation, which runs the games, he was trying to be statesmanlike, referencing the war in Gaza, and speaking of the “bonds of unity” that span the continent. Turkey has been interested in the Nomad Games since their founding, in 2014, as a way of bolstering a shared Turkic identity between itself and the Central Asian states. Indeed, Turkey was the first country to recognize Kazakhstan’s independence, and it has long been Ankara’s aim to create its own sphere of influence to mitigate against the encroaching powers of Russia and China.
But Astana is a strange place to celebrate a shared history. One generation ago, the city barely existed: just a small town on a weather-beaten patch of land once used as a gulag for the wives of Soviet traitors. Since becoming the new nation’s capital, in 1997, Astana has grown into an ungainly metropolis of imposing avenues, mismatched towers, and an unfinished multi-billion-dollar monorail that cleaves the city in two like a scar. Locals call it “the monument to corruption.”
Joanna Lillis, the author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan, says the Nomad Games are a classic example of soft power. She has charted Kazakhstan’s rise from a struggling former Soviet republic into a monocratic petrostate and has watched it gingerly traverse the region’s shifting geopolitical interests.
A Kazakh businessman has offered the Americans 20,000 tenge (about $40) if they can score just one point.
To the north, Kazakhstan shares a 4,700-mile border with Russia, and, although almost 15 percent of the country’s population identifies as Russian, the Ukraine war has left Kazakhs understandably wary of its neighbor. The tensions can be seen in the country’s controversial push to change its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin.
“Russia’s always been the dominant player: politically, economically [and] culturally,” Lillis explains. “People study in Russia and work in Russia,” and most of Kazakhstan’s oil passes through its northern neighbor. Lillis tells me that the war in Ukraine has really opened Kazakhs’ eyes to what Russia is capable of. “Kazakhstan does have a delicate diplomatic tightrope it has to walk. It can’t antagonize Russia too much… there’s 15 percent of the population which speaks Russian, [who] Putin thinks he has the right to protect.”
At the same time China, its neighbor to the east, has been making significant inroads. In 2013, China’s President Xi launched his trans-global, $8 trillion Belt and Road Initiative in Astana. The current Kazakh president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, studied in China and is fluent in Mandarin.
“China has become a big investment partner,” Lillis says. “And Kazakhstan has also had these relations with the West, but the West has been very fickle. It takes an interest when it needs Central Asia, then it loses interest … and it’s a long way away.”
The games themselves offer a strange collision between modernity and ancient life. There are horse-milk-ice-cream trucks. Huntresses carrying eagles can be seen scrolling Instagram. At one point there was an announcement that a traditional Kazakh board game had been launched into the stratosphere by the Russian space agency, and when a rogue drone was spotted above the horseback archers, $100 was offered to whoever could shoot it down. The drone easily outmaneuvered the arrows.
But the most controversial incursion of modern life was the replacement of the traditional bloody goat carcass in the kok boru tournament with a fake, synthetic replacement, supposedly for ethical reasons. In the south of the country, where kok boru is regularly played, riders sometimes die on the pitch. There has been much grumbling about new regulations and safety standards being forced on the sport.
Along with the Soviet-era rockets there were remnants of past empires everywhere. The United Kingdom had sent a tug-of-war team made up of fresh-faced university graduates. On their arrival, they had been taken for dinner by the British Embassy. “I think they were just relieved we weren’t another oil company,” says one. Despite British companies being deeply enmeshed in Kazakhstan’s gas and oil fields, the United Kingdom is well behind the other powers in terms of influence here.
The British tuggers faced Russia first, a meticulously drilled team about twice their size. The two countries had spent half the 19th century covertly squaring off for control of Central Asia, in what became known as the Great Game. Today, the game is pretty one-sided; the British are trounced.
Yet the strongest rivalries here remain ancient, almost mythological. If there is to be some kind of climax to the games it’s the kok par final (essentially the same game as kok boru, but with an end zone instead of a ring). It’s a grudge match—Kazakhstan versus Kyrgyzstan—and the noise is deafening. This is the Kazakhs’ national game. According to myth—and some science—Kazakhs invented riding. However, mares and stallions are also baked into the Kyrgyz mythology. It’s a battle to see who are the true horsemen.
In a shock, the Kyrgyz go up 3–1, and their followers, wearing traditional ak-kalpaks—tall white felt hats—begin howling ecstatically. Then the comeback begins. In the thick of it, one of the Kyrgyz appears to have been hit by one of the Kazakhs’ riding crops. The situation spirals out of control until the police are called to separate the teams. After some form of order is restored, Kazakhstan equalizes. The stadium erupts. Then the Kyrgyz go up 4–3, but, right before the final whistle, Kazakhstan equalizes again: 4–4. It’s sudden death, bated breath, then a Kazakh rider makes a break for it, bound for glory.
Chaos reigns. Members of the press hurry from the sidelines but are caught among the horses as the winning team performs a victory lap. Crocs-wearing content creators frantically try to avoid being trampled to death. The triumphant athletes throw their whips and padded hats into the crowd, sparking a brawl, then ride to the stables, where they’re mobbed by adoring fans. Out of the corner of my eye I see two archers on camels ride off into the setting sun.
Miles Ellingham is a London-based journalist. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, and 1843 magazine
