Tag Archives: Sports

Sumo is the greatest sport on earth

I’ve explained elsewhere why sumo (traditional Japanese wrestling) is the greatest sport on earth — it’s fast, complex, and incredibly exciting. I won an apple in my first sumo bout at age three, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Cindy Su apparently agrees with me, because she built this wonderful rikishi (or wrestler — sumo is the name of the sport, not the name of the wrestlers). She layers various round tiles to bulk up the underlying BrickHeadz form, and gives this mountain of a man a stand complete with a Japanese flag to pose on. He has huge arms to shove opponents out of the ring, with an expressive face that seems to say he’s relieved to have just finished a winning bout.

相撲力士（sumo rikishi /りきし)

Interestingly, many of the top wrestlers these days are foreign-born, from countries like Mongolia and Georgia. As someone who spent 15 years getting called gaijin (foreigner, with connotations of “outsider”) in my own home country, I’ve taken a perverse pleasure in rooting for the foreigners in recent sumo tournaments. Of course, sumo wrestlers aren’t born quite so big. They bulk up by eating a special stew called chankonabe, which Cindy has also faithfully created for this rikishi to enjoy.

相撲力士（sumo rikishi /りきし)

Tlachtli: The Mesoamerican ballgame

The Mesoamerican ballgame is an ancient sport played throughout Central America starting more than three thousand years ago. While some games may have been played purely for exercise or entertainment, there is strong archaeological and historical evidence for highly ritualized games that could even end in human sacrifice for some or all of the losers. W. Navarre has captured the action of a ballgame from the Aztec era, when ballcourts included rings through which players tried to bounce the rubber ball. The builder uses forced perspective to achieve a backdrop with a stepped pyramid temple — even the blazing blue sky is built with bricks.

Tlachtli; The Aztec Games

The microscale pyramid includes decorative elements made from cut stickers — only official LEGO stickers, of course! The cheese slopes work wonderfully for the pyramid’s steps.

Tlachtli; The Aztec Games

Going for the strike

This bowling alley vignette by David Zambito captures all the vibes of a classic pastime. There’s just the right amount of details to draw your attention to key features such as the bowling pins and the players. Even the gutters are there to remind some of us how much more practice is needed. Here’s hoping our minifig bowler scores a strike!

Bowling

Pretending I’m a superman

This LEGO skateboard by French builder Jimmy Fortel reminds me of my middle school days of skating and playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The detailing in the trucks and the bends in the nose and tail look realistic, and the skull deck graphic ties the whole build together visually.

Skull Board

LEGO teams up with ESPN for College Football Playoffs [News]

LEGO just announced a partnership with ESPN to cross-promote the upcoming College Football Playoffs. LEGO has created brick-built helmets for each of the four playoff teams, as well as some smaller football-related models for which they’ve released instructions to build your own.

ESPN & LEGO

The LEGO® team and ESPN are teaming up to build even more excitement and family fun for this season’s College Football Playoff!
To help get you ready, check back for more exciting updates through January 11th to see:

Cool college football models – tiny and life-sized! – built using LEGO bricks
Awesome videos about the four semifinal teams and the LEGO
models that have been built to celebrate the playoff season
Mini-models that you can build to decorate your New Year’s Eve game viewing party
A chance to win the LEGO version of the National Championship
Trophy signed by the ESPN College GameDay crew to show off to your friends!

Click the helmets to watch a time-lapse video of them being constructed.
OklahomaMichiganClemsonAlabama

ESPN & LEGO

Check out LEGO.com for more information.

Just for kicks

Here’s an excellent scale model of a classic kick scooter by Piotr Machalski. It’s not exactly one-to-one scale and probably isn’t safe to ride. But it does fold up, and Piotr came up with a neat approach to the wheels:

The build of the century

Unless you happen to live here in Seattle, where we had a major cable TV outage last night – or you just happen to have something useful to do with your time, money and brain cells – then you might have watched last night’s stunt (sorry, “sporting event”) where two overpaid thugs (sorry, “athletes”) danced around the ring with no more incentive than who would go home with 60% rather than 40% of a staggering 9-digit prize pot. And now this truly historic event has been suitably ridiculed (sorry, “immortalized”) in LEGO by Swedish character building duo SuckMyBrick!

Medieval Mountain Bobsledding

This winter scene, by mrcp6d is a ton of fun. To begin with, the landscaping and snowbanks are perfect. That isn’t easy to do and it gives this model a great foundation. But it is the posing of the minifigs that really sells this build. The grim vikings as they lose, the celebrating of the winners and their fans and the total dejection of the bare-armed woman (isn’t she cold?) as she watches her team come in last really make this scene come alive. It’s too bad bobsledding wasn’t invented until the 1870s because it would have been a great medieval sport!

Mountain Bobsled Racing 2

Beast Quake, 12th Man, and the Seahawks

I can’t say I’d ever imagined blogging a sports-related creation, let alone football. It’s just not my thing. But TBB perennial favorite Iain Heath presents the Beast Quake, referring to the roar of Seattle’s home crowd that registered seismic activity in the region. You know. Typical Seattle stuff.

Anyway, here it is in its blue and green glory.

Beast Quake!

(For what it’s worth? Go Hawks!)

Suit up for some Zero-G Classic Spaceball.

The 2013 MocAthalon is churning out some imaginative entries, like this future-sport diorama from Jon Blackford, a.k.a. Heiwa71 called “Zero-G Classic Spaceball”. Constructed for the category “No Gravity”, this impressive model features Classic Sports boilerplate like cheerleaders, goals, fans and even a machine to generate the “jump-ball”. The only thing curiously missing is a score-board, but perhaps Classic Spacemen have evolved past the need to keep score. The game appears to be a mix between soccer, basketball and the game Triad from the old Battlestar Galactica series played in either red or blue diapers. MOCpages has additional photos for your viewing pleasure.

Zero-G Classic Spaceball