Mongolian wrestling, known as bökh, is the national sport of Mongolia: it is the most important of the “three manly games” (wrestling, horse racing and archery) and the centrepiece of the National Naadam festival, held every year from 11 to 13 July at the National Sports Stadium in Ulaanbaatar, where 512 or 1,024 wrestlers meet in a single knockout draw. Horse racing and archery share the festival, which has been on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list since 2010. Abroad, the same wrestling culture has produced most of the recent grand champions of Japanese sumo. Each section below starts from one number and the story behind it.
1,024 Wrestlers: The Single Draw at the National Naadam
Wrestling at the National Naadam is a straight knockout with no seeding by weight. In a full year 1,024 wrestlers enter (512 in others), and each bout removes the loser, so the champion must win nine or ten consecutive matches across the festival. There is no repechage and no points table. A wrestler who touches the ground with his upper body, knee or elbow is out.
The stage is the National Sports Stadium in Ulaanbaatar’s Khan Uul District. Built with Soviet help in 1958, with its central roof finished by Mongolian builders in 1971, it seats 12,500 and sits on a 27-hectare plot. Before the wrestling starts, the nine horse-tail banners of Genghis Khan, which represent the nine tribes of the Mongols, are carried from Sükhbaatar Square to the stadium to open the festival, followed by parades of mounted cavalry, athletes and monks. The National Naadam officially commemorates the 1921 revolution, while a second large festival, the Danshig Naadam, became an annual event in 2015 and marks independence from the Qing dynasty.
Rank in bökh can only be earned at a Naadam, and it is held for life. The lowest title, Falcon of the Sum, goes to the top four wrestlers at a district-level Naadam in any of Mongolia’s 329 sums. At the top sits the title of avarga, usually translated as titan or champion. A wrestler who wins five or more bouts without bettering his previous best receives an honorific instead of a promotion; a State Hawk who repeats his six wins, for instance, becomes an Unen Zorigt (“truly brave”) State Hawk.
115 Kilograms: Wrestling with No Weight Classes
The median wrestler at the National Naadam weighs about 115 kg, but the spread is enormous. The smallest competitors weigh around 70 kg and the largest more than 160 kg, and because bökh has no weight classes, no age limits and no time limit, a light wrestler can be drawn against an opponent more than twice his size. Bouts in the higher rounds once lasted an hour or more while the two men felt each other out, so the rules now let each wrestler’s second agree fair grips to speed things up.
That second is the zasuul, an elder or friend who holds his wrestler’s hat, sings his praises in the later rounds and slaps him on the backside if the bout goes slowly. The wrestlers themselves wear three items: the zodog, a tight short-sleeved red or blue jacket open at the chest; the shuudag, small tight briefs; and gutal, leather boots with slightly upturned toes. Legend says the jacket was cut open after a champion tore off her zodog to show that she was a woman. Before and after each bout the wrestler performs the devee, a dance imitating a falcon or phoenix taking off. Good manners are part of the sport: if an opponent’s clothes come loose, the other wrestler is expected to stop and help him straighten them, even if it costs a winning position.
1200 AD: The Bout Recorded in the Secret History
Cave paintings in Bayankhongor Province, dated to around 7000 BC, show two men grappling in front of spectators, and wrestlers appear on bronze plates from the Xiongnu empire (206 BC to AD 220). The word itself means firmness or reliability, from a Mongolic root meaning “firm, hard, solid; strong man”.
The first detailed account comes from The Secret History of the Mongols, written in 1240. Its paragraph 140 describes a match staged by Genghis Khan in the Year of the Monkey, 1200, between Buri Bökh, an undefeated champion, and Genghis Khan’s half-brother Belgutei. At a sign from the khan, Belgutei broke Buri’s back. Genghis Khan valued wrestling as training for his army, and successive emperors of the Mongol Empire and the later khanates kept it in their festivals. When the Finnish traveller Axel Heikel visited Urga, now Ulaanbaatar, in the summer of 1891, he watched a whole week of wrestling in front of a temple, with the winners prostrating themselves before the Bogd Gegen and prizes paid in goats and sheep.
19 Naadam Titles: Namkhai, Sharavjamts and Bat-Erdene
The most successful wrestler on record is Namkhai, who won the Naadam 19 times and finished second seven times, taking his first title in 1895. His near contemporary Jambyn Sharavjamts, born in 1876, became famous at 18 and kept winning through three political eras: the Qing dynasty to 1911, the Bogd Khan’s state from 1911 to 1924 and the Mongolian People’s Republic. Invited to the State Naadam of 1945, he beat three opponents at nearly 70 years old, and he retired only in 1951.
Only 20 wrestlers have reached the giant rank since 1921, and the most successful of the modern era is Badmaanyambuugiin Bat-Erdene, born on 7 June 1964 in Khentii Province. He won the National Naadam 11 times between 1988 and 1999, including the 1990 Naadam marking the 750th anniversary of the Secret History, and also took a world sambo title in the over-100 kg class in 1989. His full title translates roughly as “renowned by all, oceanic, makes people happy, strong titan”. He retired in 2006, founded Avarga University in Ulaanbaatar to train wrestlers and coaches, and served as Mongolia’s defence minister from 2016 to 2017.
6,002 Wrestlers: The 2011 Guinness World Record
On 17 September 2011 Mongolia staged a national wrestling competition with 6,002 entrants, which Guinness World Records lists as the largest wrestling competition ever held. The figure gives a sense of how deep participation runs in a country of about 3.5 million people, where families traditionally hope that a newborn son will grow up to be a wrestler.
The calendar is full outside July too. Every Lunar New Year, 256 wrestlers meet at the Wrestling Palace in Ulaanbaatar in the second most important tournament of the year; no rank is awarded, but its winners are often tipped for the summer. Regional Danshig Naadams draw 256 or 128 wrestlers, the best wrestlers of each aimag meet in an annual team competition, and smaller events of 64 or 128 are held at the Wrestling Palace through spring and autumn. Since 2009 an All Ethnic Mongol Wrestling Tournament has brought together wrestlers from Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Buryatia, Tuva and Kalmykia; former yokozuna Asashōryū is its honorary president.
27 Kilometres: Naadam Horse Racing and Child Jockeys
The second manly game is a test of endurance, not speed. Western flat races rarely run much beyond 2 km, but Naadam races are cross-country contests of 15 to 30 km over open steppe, with the distance set by the horses’ age: two-year-olds race 16 km and seven-year-olds 27 km. Up to 1,000 horses from anywhere in Mongolia can be entered, and they follow a special diet in the weeks before the festival.
The riders are children aged 5 to 13, chosen and trained in the months before the race, but the contest is really judged on the horse. The top five horses in each class earn the title airgiyn tav, the first three receive gold, silver and bronze medals, and the winning jockey is hailed as tumny ekh, “leader of ten thousand”. The horse that finishes last in the two-year-olds’ race is not forgotten either: it is called bayan khodood, “full stomach”, and a song is sung wishing it victory the following year.
75 Metres: Archery and the Wall of Surs
Archery is the one Naadam game in which women compete alongside men; wrestling is open only to men. Men shoot from 75 metres and women from 65 metres, in teams of ten, with each archer given four arrows and the team needing 33 hits on the surs to finish. The surs are small woven or wooden cylinders stacked three high into a low wall roughly five feet wide. Knocking one out counts as a hit, and hitting the centre scores more. Each time an arrow strikes, the judges call out uuhai, “hooray”, and an official rebuilds the wall. Archers compete in the traditional deel robe with a leather bracer up to the elbow, and the winners are named national marksman and national markswoman.
45 Championships: Hakuhō and Mongolia’s Sumo Yokozuna
Bökh skills travel. In January 2003 Asashōryū, born Dolgorsürengiin Dagvadorj in 1980, became the first Mongolian to reach yokozuna, the top rank in Japanese sumo, and in 2005 he became the first wrestler to win all six official tournaments in one year. He was followed by Hakuhō, born Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal in Ulaanbaatar in 1985, who won a record 45 top-division championships and 16 of them with a perfect record. Hakuhō’s father, Jigjidiin Mönkhbat (1941–2018), was a six-time national bökh champion who held the rank of Darkhan Avarga and won an unbeaten silver in freestyle wrestling at Mexico City in 1968, the Games at which Mongolia took its first Olympic medals. Harumafuji, Kakuryū and Terunofuji made it five Mongolian-born yokozuna; Hakuhō, Kakuryū and Terunofuji later took Japanese citizenship.
The wrestling base also underpins Mongolia’s Olympic record of 31 medals, all at the Summer Games, in freestyle wrestling, boxing, shooting and judo. The first golds came at Beijing in 2008, from judoka Naidangiin Tüvshinbayar and, a few days later, boxer Enkhbatyn Badar-Uugan. To see where the Naadam is held, read our guide to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia; the open grassland that shapes the horse races is described in our post on the Mongolian Plateau, and the sport that Mongolian wrestlers came to dominate has its own story in the national sport of Japan.