PANKRATION
Pankration was an unarmed combat sport introduced into the Greek Olympic Games in 648 BC. The athletes used boxing and wrestling techniques but also others, such as kicking, holds, joint-locks, and chokes on the ground, making it similar to modern mixed martial arts. Is teh most violent sports in Greece.
Materials:
For this sport the people were loincloths and battle gloves, for protect.
HOW TO PLAY?
Being a mixture of wrestling (pale, in Greek) and boxing (pyx), techniques from both disciplines were used in the pankration, such as the hedran strephein, which can be translated as "flip your behind", the meson echein or "grab of the middle", the trachelizein or "hold by the neck" and the ankyrizein or "throw from the haunch", among others.
Other movements to mention: the gastrizein which consisted of a kick to the stomach, the apopternizein where the wrestler grabbed his opponent's ankle to make him lose balance and fall to the ground, and the klimakismos where the wrestler caught his rival from behind , by the neck and began to strangle him.
Punches were allowed, although the wrestlers did not wrap their hands with himantes or bandages. More or less everything was allowed. Crushing with feet and slaps, among other things. The genitals were not even respected.
Blows to the face, the application of crushing or strangulation holds, breaking and dislocating limbs were also highly successful techniques.
Tripping, grabbing the opponent and throwing himself at him were very common practices. Attacks like low kicking the opponent were perfectly allowed. One of the techniques, the scissors, sought to have the rival's abdomen linked with the legs, to suffocate the rival with his free hands. This tactic was precisely the one that cost the life of the Olympic champion Arriquión de Figalia in the 54th (fifty-fourth) edition of the Olympic Games (in 564 BC). Polidamas de Escotusa was an Olympic champion in 408 BC. C..
The rules only penalized biting and sticking fingers in the opponent's eyes, nose, or mouth.
PHOTOS:
