The first time you hear Ulak-tartysh—what many visitors know as kok-bory—you think it’s thunder. Then you realize the “thunder” is hooves: dozens of horses cutting the steppe like a fast-moving storm, riders leaning low, shouting, laughing, arguing with fate and physics at the same time.
I grew up with this sound in my bones. In Kyrgyzstan, kok-bory isn’t just a sport you watch. It’s something you recognize—the way you recognize a mountain pass or the smell of smoke from a village bathhouse in winter. It belongs to our nomadic memory: the open land, the horse as a partner, and the stubborn pride that says, “If it looks impossible, maybe it’s worth doing.”
When I travel with friends from abroad, I tell them: don’t come expecting a tidy stadium show with perfect silence between plays. Come expecting life—messy, loud, and honest. The riders crowd together, shoulder to shoulder, trying to seize the ulak and break free. You’ll see a man’s boot almost scraping the ground as he leans down, and you’ll swear he’s about to fall—then he rises like nothing happened, horse and rider moving as one. That’s the moment tourists stop taking videos and just stare.
The rules are simple in theory: teams battle to carry the ulak to the goal, the taikazan. In reality, kok-bory is strategy wrapped in chaos. There’s muscle, yes, but also timing, nerve, and teamwork. One rider blocks like a wall, another slips through like water, and a third waits for the split-second when the crowd opens—then launches forward, dust flying, eyes fixed on the goal.
What I love most is everything around the game. Before it starts, there’s that quiet tension: horses stamping, riders adjusting saddles, elders watching with the calm of people who’ve seen many winters. Someone sells tea, someone else offers bread. And every few minutes you hear a joke—Kyrgyz humor is like our weather: sharp, quick, and sometimes arriving without warning.
When the match ends, you don’t feel like you’ve just watched entertainment. You feel like you’ve been introduced to a piece of who we are: a nomadic country that learned to move, endure, and celebrate under a huge sky. Kok-bory is not a museum tradition. It’s living. It’s loud. It’s proud. And if you ever find yourself on a windy field in Kyrgyzstan, with mountains on the horizon and hooves shaking the earth—trust me, you’ll understand why we keep coming back.