This is cute. One website, in promising to teach sepak takraw in five steps, says the first is to flip a coin to see who serves first. It is like saying that writing a novel is merely the outcome to the first step of buying a pen (or today, a laptop).
Sepak takraw? At some point in our sports-watching lives on TV, we have all come across this South East Asian sport: volleyball with feet, smaller ball, crazy skills and obscure.
Except that every description of it, including the one above, is monumentally inadequate. Here is one, which sounds like a bad circus flyer: “an acrobatic hybrid of soccer and volleyball that has spectators gripped with its non-stop dynamism and flair”.
Here is another, better one, from Drew Lilley, who is the only English-language analyst of the sport (and has a column on the sport’s official website called SepaktakDrew – get it?): “It’s as close as any ball sport will ever get to a martial art.”
Lilley gets closer but still does not get right there. These athletes are like a bunch of gymnasts playing hacky-sack with a slightly bigger ball across a net about 1.55m high.
They leap like basketball players and can control a ball considerably smaller than a football, just as well as professional footballers.
Their version of the volleyball spike – hard enough to do well with hands – is to do it as an overhead kick, except that it is not just an overhead kick, but a kind of backflip which lands them back on their feet somehow, or at least on the wrists, from which to spring back up immediately.
That alone puts two sports to shame: volleyball for using hands, and football, in which to even attempt an overhead kick is seen as some otherworldly skill. To score from one? They are spectacular, sure, but they do not happen often enough. In sepak takraw, overhead kicks are the default setting.
For passing viewers, it can be easy to forget it is a sport at all, with all the notions of competition that implies. That would be a perfectly reasonable reaction, too, as it was long considered, in Thailand especially, a form of exercise more than anything else.
It is easier to just get lost in the wonder of discovering the kinds of things a human body can do, and the degree of coordination and cooperation it can create. At first, scores and teams barely matter. And it is a genuinely insane spectacle – if you look at photographs of a game, the natural impulse is to rotate them 90 degrees so that it makes sense.
The sport is spectacular and undemanding on the spectator in every way – matches rarely last an hour – and yet it remains an obscurity. Few people outside of the region where it originated are aware of its existence.
At least at the Asian Games, it is a pretty big deal, where it has been a discipline since 1990. Thailand and Malaysia, who both claim to have invented the sport (it has disputed origins), have been the dominant forces, and the former has won 18 of the 27 gold medals awarded at the Asiad.
There remains around it a sense of amateur disorder. On Monday in Incheon, for instance, a doubles team from Singapore was awarded a bronze medal because Laos did not turn up on time for a semi-final against the hosts South Korea.
That is not a huge surprise, given its history. The sport has been played in one form or another since as long ago as the 15th century. One lineage traces it back to a game the Chinese military played and spread through their trade links.
For years, each of the main countries that played it – Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines – had their own versions and rules.
It was only in 1960 that they got together to standardise rules and attempt to bring some kind of control. Still, the International Sepak Takraw (a variation on the spelling) Federation (ISTAF) was not formed until 1992, which, even accounting for the restricted, localised spread of the sport, is tardy.
That, more than anything, has kept it from really breaking out into newer terrain. Now at least a snazzy new league is in place, and as is obligatory for any such sport, an Olympic flame has sparked within.
The ISTAF reckons it has a hope of becoming an Olympic sport as early as 2024, though given it has only 28 registered national associations, aspiration is far outstripping ground reality. Equally obligatorily, it calls itself the fastest-growing sport in Asia.
That is an arguable claim given the one, glaringly obvious barrier to entry: not everyone can walk up and overhead-kick a small, plastic ball precisely where it needs to go and still land on their feet. Few people can do it after years of practice.
But let us be honest about this. Even now, there are at least a couple of Olympic sports that will provide less entertainment and spectacle during their lifetime than a single point of sepak takraw.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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