Thumbs up! Hong Kong hosts hundreds of competitors for World Thumb Wrestling Championships
Now a professional sport, the schoolyard pastime encourages local residents to pull their eyes and thumbs away from their smartphones and engage others
A different kind of sport has come to Hong Kong. One that you’re more likely to see down at your local tavern than at the Olympics. Professional thumb wrestling.
The three-week-long World Thumb Wrestling Championships, created in a UK pub in 2009, arrived in Hong Kong for the first time last month and has since attracted more than 200 local participants.
Organisers are hoping the event, which concludes on Friday, will encourage Hongkongers to pull their eyes and thumbs away from their smartphone screens and instead engage others.
“At its core, thumb wrestling is about people coming together,” Mark Wright, co-founder of the championships, said. “It is a game where you have to sit across from someone and actually talk to them.”
He said when kids who are largely addicted to their smartphone for games and entertainment try thumb wrestling for the first time they get “really excited and active”.
