In Kok Boru, Athletes Battle Over a Headless Goat—On Horseback

Twenty-four hours in Kazakhstan was enough for the youngest member of the United States kok boru team to land himself with one foot in the grave and the other hung up on his saddle. Wyatt Mortenson, twenty-three years old, had never been to Central Asia, had never played kok boru, had been horseback for all of twenty minutes before he wound up suspended upside down by his boot, unable to either regain his seat or uncouple himself from the Kazakh stallion that was half a second from rag-dolling him around the arena.

It was the team’s first and only practice at the World Nomad Games in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital. About 3,000 athletes from eighty-nine countries had gathered to compete in twenty-one events: falconry and eagling, archery (both on foot and horseback), martial arts of many sorts, tug of war, horse racing, a strength event called “powerful nomad,” and the game we would be playing, kok boru. The object of the game is to pick up a headless goat—or, in the case of these Games, a seventy-pound chunk of rubber shaped like a goat—and throw it into the other team’s goal, a plastic basin about the size of a hot tub.

Wyatt leaned down from his horse and grabbed the rubber goat by a leg. As he was hauling it upward, the horse stepped on it—a common enough occurrence in the game. The sudden reversal of force cantilevered him straight toward the ground—but the saddle’s steel handle slid inside his tall leather boot as he was falling. His horse was about to bolt for the horizon when Wyatt managed to reach up and grab the nearside rein, turning the horse in a tight circle until a Kazakh referee, who had been watching the U.S. team practice, sprang from his horse and freed Wyatt’s boot.

Our first practice was a big deal for two reasons. One, the team needed to feel out the horses, a loaner squad of Kazakh animals trained for the game. Two, we needed to ensure that the Kazakh saddles we’d been given were in working order. Kok boru players use a doubled-up rigging of two-inch-wide trucker straps to handle the rotational torque of lifting the goat; watching one of these guys saddle his horse before a game gave new meaning to a tight girth. And a third reason was to burn off the pre-game jitters accumulated over months of preparation. In kok boru, adrenaline is not your friend.

The team took the practice field at the hippodrome—the Games’ horse facility, with a central field surrounded by a racetrack and grandstand—and everything seemed in good enough shape. The horses were lively. Then Nick Willert’s horse started to balk, as though disinclined to engage in the scrum. When Nick encouraged him forward, the horse kicked out both back legs like a mule. Nick asked again and the horse jumped backward, spun to the right, and kicked Wyatt in the elbow—not a fun place to be kicked by a horse.

I was standing on the sidelines. Nick looked at me. “What the fuck is wrong with this horse?” he asked.

Gathered on the practice field were a dozen old Kazakh men and one middle-aged coach of the Chinese team, some of them on horseback. Eager to watch the cowboys from America go at it, the old men encouraged a scrimmage. The team should have declined, should have been more deliberate about its approach to the horses, the scrumming together, the picking up of the dummy goat, but instead the guys flew into action like true American cowboys: headlong and about to get hurt.

While no one on the team is a working cowboy, all are cowboy enough to think that kok boru is a good idea.

First came Wyatt’s hang-up. Then Brendan Bryant, who’s been making trips to Central Asia to play kok boru since 2016, was knocked from his horse, got his foot caught in the stirrup, and was dragged by his left leg until his own horse kicked him inside the knee. The kick dislodged Brendan’s foot and jerked his boot off, so that he lay writhing in the dirt with a white stocking foot for all to see. After a half hour of this kind of absurdity, Mike Sabo, the oldest member of the team at fifty-three, was pulling the goat aboard when the tendon in his right bicep ruptured with an audible pop.

“That was the gnarliest sound I’ve ever heard,” Nick said.

I’d heard it before. I’d been on the team roster myself until two weeks prior, when I ruptured my own bicep tendon while training. So I’d come to Kazakhstan with my right arm in a sling, acting as the team manager.

That was enough for one day. We were down a man—Mike’s bicep was already curling like a snail at the top of his arm—and Brendan could hardly walk. Our first practice had been a disaster, and the first game would be against the Kazakh national team, the home team, on its home turf in front of its own fans, at a venue that was very much a spectacle of Kazakh nationalism.

Ladd Howell, our star player and cocaptain, walked over to me leading his horse. His face was glazed with sweat, and his horse was breathing heavily.

“Some of these horses act like they don’t have a clue what’s going on out there,” he said. He leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and spit in the dirt. “You forget how dangerous this game is until you play it again. This was an eye-opener.”

It’s not like we didn’t know what we were getting into. Half of us had played kok boru at previous World Nomad Games. All but Wyatt and Mike had played it in competition in Kyrgyzstan. Those two alone could be absolved from what otherwise may appear as collective amnesia, because it’s a difficult game to play without tearing up your body.

Risk aside, we keep coming back. We come away from the experience having learned something about horses and people. Along with the sports-medicine trainer, Hayden Hilke, and our Kyrgyz coach, Nurgazy Ruslanbek, the U.S. team consisted of eight men from different parts of the American West who hadn’t trained together or ridden together or even seen much of each other in the past year. The common thread is that we enjoy doing fun things on horseback in faraway places.

It all started in 2010 with a Jackson, Wyoming-based organization, Vista 360°, that coordinates cultural exchanges between the American West and Central Asia. The U.S. first participated in the World Nomad Games in 2014, and I first played in 2018. Officially we are the U.S.A. Nomadic Sports Federation, and our participation in the Games has been made possible by public-affairs grants through U.S. embassies. The embassies earn goodwill by trotting out the cowboys at prearranged events, like television talk show appearances and roping demonstrations. The grant money, in turn, covers the team’s expenses.

Kyrgyzstan hosted the first three World Nomad Games—in 2014, ’16, and ’18—on the shores of a remarkably beautiful lake where traders on the old Silk Road once camped and where Bronze Age rock carvings show alpine ibexes and people on horseback. Turkey hosted in 2022 (the U.S. kok boru team didn’t play that year) and now we’d come to Astana, a modern city of 1.3 million people. The city expected 100,000 tourists for the Games and had set up six competition venues and what the Games called an “ethno-bazaar” where families, school groups, and tourists mingled among white yurts, hooded eagles, and vats of steaming rice. The bazaar’s vendors loosely represented the swath of cultures between the Black Sea and China, selling rugs, tea, horse gear, silver jewelry, and just about anything that can be made out of felt.

The Kazakhs attacked with their horses, forcing the gaping mouths and brawny chests of the stallions into the faces and saddles of the Americans.

The opening ceremony drew 30,000 people to the Astana Arena for an elaborate spectacle involving a pyrotechnic display with horses, dogs, and dancers. A screen behind the stage showed reels of laden camels, galloping horses, and the eternal blue sky over the rolling steppe.

Speaking from behind glass in a skybox above the grandstands, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proclaimed that the World Nomad Games united cultures in the same way nomadic people once connected cultures from the Mediterranean to the Far East. He talked about Attila the Hun and the Golden Horde and about khanates and kingdoms of millennia past. “The great nomadic life will never cease to exist,” he said, as an English translation of his words scrolled across the big screen. “Even amid globalization, the nomadic lifestyle that existed for thousands of years is reviving and taking a new shape. Modern nomads are making efforts to reclaim a central place in history.”

Kok boru is part of that history. Oral tradition says the game may be older than Islam, older than Christianity. Nomads of the steppe mounted on swift horses would protect their flocks of sheep and goats by running down a predatory wolf, cutting off its head, and playing keep-away with the body. Whoever made it back to camp carrying the wolf won the game. At some point a goat was substituted for the wolf. Various forms of the game developed: kok boru in Kyrgyzstan, kokpar in Kazakhstan, buzkashi in Afghanistan. Teams were organized, leagues were formed, hippodromes built, and today, professionals can make a living playing the games.

The U.S. team was one of seven entered in the kok boru tournament and one of nine in kokpar. We wanted to make a good showing in our first game: The organizers had assembled and stabled twenty horses on our behalf; given us saddles, boots, and bridles; put us up at the hotel with the other athletes; and assigned us an English-speaking attaché.

“I just don’t want it to be a blowout,” said Ladd.

It was a blowout. The Americans hardly touched the goat. The Kazakhs flew their horses up and down the field while the U.S. struggled for position. And the hits came hard. The Kazakhs attacked with their horses, forcing the gaping mouths and brawny chests of the stallions into the faces and saddles of the Americans. Three U.S. players had their heads (forehead, eyelid, and a spot just behind the ear) cut by the teeth of Kazakh horses. A bridle bit sliced open the backside of Wyatt’s hand. Cocaptain Scott Zimmerman was knocked from his saddle, got his boot caught in the stirrup, and was dragged by his leg until he could logroll his body twice around and twist free. The Kazakhs scored at will while the grandstands waved a turquoise-and-yellow sea of Kazakh flags. The final score was 18 to 0.

After the game, the boys lay decamped against the wall of the barn waiting for the bus. The hippodrome included a complex of half a dozen barns where the horses were staged for the Games. In front of one barn, a Kyrgyz player was wrapping the front legs of a bay horse. On a pad of loose sand, a young groom held the line to another horse that rolled and wallowed in the sand.

An old man and his son or grandson approached. The man wanted a photo of the boy with the team. Nick put his black cowboy hat on the kid, who was probably eight. Somehow, through no common spoken language, it became known that the kid was into martial arts, and pretty soon Nick had both his hands up as targets and the kid was in boxing stance, striking with his left and right. Nick danced and ducked and encouraged the kid—“Whoo, whoo, whoo, that’s what I’m talking about, gimme one more!”—while the old man took a video. The kid was glowing like he’d just won the fight, and Nick gave him a high five and a fistful of Team U.S.A. stickers.

I’d seen Nick do the same thing at the 2018 Games. In 2022, he led a jujitsu workshop and nearly a hundred kids showed up. The benefits of these interactions flow in both directions. The role of athlete ambassador isn’t always fun, given the physical requirements of the game—but it’s part of the deal. We wear cowboy hats, boots, and jeans, and we’re tagged on social media as the kok boru cowboys. And while no one on the team is a working cowboy, all are cowboy enough to think that kok boru is a good idea.

Scott runs a property management business in Jackson. He first played kok boru in 2016 and has a repaired bicep tendon, several scars, and two fingers that won’t fully straighten to show for his efforts. Ladd is a project manager for a landscaping and construction company in Ogden, Utah. He speaks Russian (an immensely valuable asset for an American kok boru player) and has shown such prowess at throwing goats that he’s negotiating to play professionally in Kyrgyzstan. Nick is a jujitsu professor and works in the defense industry in Carpinteria, California. At the 2018 Games, he also placed fourth in horseback wrestling (in which two shirtless men on horses grapple violently) and has a tattoo of two horseback wrestlers on his left forearm. Brendan works for an organization in Colorado Springs that helps college graduates work overseas. I have a photo of him at breakfast during the 2018 Games with white gauze wrapped around his head like he just crawled out of a Civil War hospital tent. The space between his eyes is blue and purple where a horse’s teeth split open the bridge of his nose.

Mike is a hunting guide and ranch hand outside Austin, Texas. He’d never played kok boru, though he competed in horseback archery at the 2018 and 2022 games. Jase Nisveta, whose eyelid I glued shut with Dermabond after the game against the Kazakhs, is a former professional rodeo roper who now works in Las Vegas. Kanton Vause, who got engaged to be married three days before leaving for the Games, is a farrier and stunt performer for the film industry in St. George, Utah. During the game against the Kazakhs, he was the only member of the team to successfully unhorse a Kazakh rider. Wyatt, who lives near me in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a stunt rider.

After I injured my bicep in August, I recruited Wyatt. I’d never met him, but I saw a photo of him riding a (domestic) bison on his dad’s Facebook page. His dad gave me his number, and when I asked Wyatt if he was interested in joining the team, he immediately said yes and texted me his boot size and a photo of his passport, per the requests of the World Nomad Games administration. A week later I was talking to him on the phone when his girlfriend took over and introduced herself as Kobie.

“I just want to make sure,” she said. “Are you going to keep Wyatt safe over there?”

That’s the question. Every member of the team has faced doubt from loved ones about traveling to Central Asia to, as a cowboy would say, hang and rattle in an ancient game. When I told a friend last spring that I was headed to Astana, he just shook his head. When I told my brother, he said, “I mean, come on, you’re forty-five years old. Isn’t it a young man’s game?”

After a tournament in Kyrgyzstan in 2022, we cooked the game goat (in Kyrgyzstan, real goats are used, and the winning team gets to eat the tenderized carcass) with a kok boru player named Manas Niyazov for a YouTube cooking show. Manas is currently one of the best in the game. While we were standing over the wok of goat meat, he reeled off some of his earnings: SUVs, apartments, horses, lots of money, herds of sheep, goats, cattle. The YouTube chef turned to me with a smirk and said, “This might be the richest man in Kyrgyzstan.” But, Manas told us, his wife hates the game. She didn’t want to watch him play, didn’t want to hear about it, and thought that if he truly loved his family, he would quit and focus on training and selling horses. Less than a week after we met him, Manas was knocked unconscious when an opponent’s horse smashed him into the goal.

At least three Americans have signed up to play kok boru, traveled to Central Asia, and then taken one look at it and thought better of joining the fray. There’s no adequate way to prepare for the sensation of the colliding horses. You can get physically fit and ride the seat out of your jeans, but it’s a form of horsemanship that doesn’t exist in North America. Seeing it on Instagram is one thing; seeing it between the ears of a horse is another.

I square the risk with my ability as a horseman to stay out of trouble. I’m not sure how the other guys do so, and I’m not going to ask because we have a hard enough time filling the roster without everyone taking a deep introspective look at why this is a permissible hobby. But the trade-off is remarkable. Playing kok boru has enhanced my understanding of the relationship between horses and humans. Twenty-five years ago, I read a line in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses that I never forgot: “No man who has not gone to war on horseback could ever truly understand the horse.” Kok boru has shed light on what that means. The game brings out a primeval quality in horses. It’s elemental and savagely organic. The sound of the goat’s bones snapping under the hooves of the scrum makes the hair stand up on my neck. The reason to play it, rather than watch it, is best explained by what coach Nurgazy says in the pregame huddle: “You must have no fear.”

Before our second game, Nurgazy told me I needed to ride one of the horses for the warm-up. He and Ladd walked up to me in the barn aisle, and Ladd translated in Russian: “He says you only have to walk the horse. I think it’ll be fine.”

Claire, my partner, works in the hospital emergency room in Santa Fe and had made it clear to me that riding a horse in Kazakhstan was a bad idea. She thought that traveling halfway around the world a week and a half after major arm surgery was risk enough and told me she didn’t want to live with an invalid for the rest of her life.

“He says it’s a gentle horse,” Ladd said.

There’s basically no such thing as a gentle kok boru horse. Every one I’ve ridden has been like a lit fuse waiting to blow. But, I figured, what the heck; it was all in either God’s or Allah’s hands. The first horse Nurgazy tried to help me mount wouldn’t stand still. It pranced and turned, and I floundered and couldn’t swing my leg over its back. Nick was unimpressed.

“What are you doing, dude?” he said. “So stupid.”

We tried a second horse. Nurgazy safely lifted me to the saddle, and for a brief fifteen minutes, as we circled the hippodrome track, I was once again horseback in Central Asia. The stirrups felt too short. The iron bars of the saddle tree cut into my inner thighs as only a kok boru saddle can. The horse was all muscle and energy and felt like he could run through a brick wall. The blue domes and white minarets of Central Asia’s largest mosque steepled the near horizon, and beyond the grandstands and beyond the skyline of Astana, the great Eurasian Steppe stretched into the distance, as flat as a becalmed ocean and, for all appearances, just as vast.

As steeped in tradition as it is, the game is not closed to outsiders. Nor, completely, to women.

Back afoot after the warm-up, I resumed my role as water boy and cheerleader for our second game, this one against a different Kazakh team. It turned out to be a far more constructive experience. The Kazakhs quickly scored an initial point, and then they eased up. They helped the U.S. They let us pick up the goat and run with it. They slowed the pace of the game to allow our riders moments of execution. The final score was 12 to 4, but it was a productive loss. The next morning, the front page of a local newspaper told the story; their photo showed Ladd reaching down for the goat with the focus of a raptor in his eye. His horse is in motion. Behind and beside him, two Kazakh riders are slowing their horses, applying the brakes to give Ladd time and space to grab the goat.

Not all edges are rough in the world of kok boru. We’ve made friends through the game. When I saw Nurgazy, who I first met at the 2018 Games, the first thing he did was show me a photo of his newborn daughter, sleeping and swaddled in blankets. He insisted I still be listed on the roster. I ran into Manas as he was taking the field on a dapple gray horse that looked as fast as polished steel. He pointed to my arm in a sling and gestured: What happened? The Kyrgyz and Kazakh communities have proven warm and accepting. As steeped in tradition as it is, the game is not closed to outsiders. Nor, completely, to women.

Though it’s not totally a man’s world, it’s pretty close. Among the very few women who play is Eva Zhigalina. She was in Astana for the games, and I talked to her with our attaché, Daniya Nurova, translating. Eva played her first kokpar game when she was thirteen years old. Games in small villages are often held in conjunction with celebrations, and that game celebrated the circumcision of a young boy. After that first game, Eva couldn’t get enough. I asked her if she ever met resistance as a woman.

“Only once,” Eva said. “One of the guys on the team was like, ‘Our ancestors never let women play, you should go home.’”

She did not go home.

“I told him that you can kill me during the game, but I will not leave.”

So they let her play. Along with kokpar, she also played a version of the game called alaman ulak, where as many as 3,000 riders vie for a single goat on a huge field.

“When I started playing kokpar professionally, they couldn’t believe that I could actually do it,” Eva said. “Then they saw how good I was doing, and some were actually embarrassed because I was outdoing them.”

Today, in addition to training and selling kokpar horses, Eva runs a riding school for girls. A documentary about her, subtitled Batyr Qyz (“Hero Girl”), details her work and her hope to one day field an all-female kokpar team. Nearly every young girl from the countryside can ride a horse, she said, but the challenge is teaching them to pick up weight from the saddle. She learned because her family had cattle; when a cow would give birth, she would ride out to find the calf, lift it into the saddle, and carry it home, with the mother following. (In the American West, a thirteen-year-old-girl who could lift a calf into the saddle and carry it home would be considered very handy.)

“When I was young, I would watch TV, and there were all these cowboys and horses,” Eva said. “And then I would see the ads for Marlboro cigarettes, and I would just look at them and be like, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up.’ The cowboys and the Marlboro ads, that’s what inspired me to become a horse trainer.”

Which means that, bless her heart, Eva is just one more example of how cowboys make the world a better place. She asked me about rodeos and roping and mustangs and if it was possible for her to import an American mustang to Kazakhstan. She said that she’d watched the U.S. team lose its first game against the Kazakh team.

“It was not a very good game,” she said. I agreed. “If your team would train together at home in America, you could be a very good team.”

The last chance for the Americans to avoid elimination came against Turkey. The U.S. wore navy blue and red tunic-style uniforms. The Turks were in purple and white. The teams lined up under their flags, the Turks with twelve riders, the maximum allowed per team, and the U.S. with the minimum of eight—including Mike, who could not play. The opening anthem played, and a prayer was offered to Allah. From the start, the teams were evenly matched. The scrum- ming was tight and inconclusive. As soon as one team lifted the goat, the other would steal it or knock it to the ground. Neither team was able to break free with enough space to score until, with two minutes remaining in the first period, Ladd hurled the goat—and his body— toward the goal as his horse was running past it. A Turk was right on his heels, and as Ladd flew from the saddle, the Turk galloped over him while the goat tumbled into the goal.

At the end of regulation time, the score was tied, and the horses and riders both looked like they’d been through battle. Ten minutes of sudden-death overtime failed to produce a winner. A shoot-out, called bullitt, would decide the match.

In bullitt, one player starts with the goat at two-thirds of the field length from the goal. His job is to run for the goal and throw the goat into it without losing his seat—he has to stay on his horse. The opposing player starts thirty meters behind. At the whistle, both take off at a gallop. Ladd went first. A lithe Turk who had scored his team’s only goal started behind him. Ladd’s horse danced in its tracks as he held the goat across his lap. At the whistle, it became clear that Ladd was on the faster horse. He beat the Turk to the goal, but as he prepared to throw it, its weight and momentum carried Ladd from his saddle and then slammed him into the side of the goal. He and the goat slumped to the dirt, the Turk thundered past, and Ladd’s horse ran off the field with an empty saddle. Ladd leaned against the goal with his head bowed. The Turk rode over and patted him on the back.

The Turk lined up to answer. They took off down the field, and Ladd caught him twenty feet before the goal. The Turk hit the brakes as they collided. He managed to slide behind Ladd, but Ladd had shaken his rhythm. As they approached the goal, both horses heaving like angry seas, the Turk shoved the goat in a passing shot. It tumbled home. But a second later, the Turk’s horse threw him from his saddle in a forward somersault. The goal didn’t count. Ladd jumped off to help the Turk, who politely refused and hobbled off the field broken and bowlegged, like he’d been in a car accident.

Jase and Brendan both made desperate but fruitless runs. Brendan’s opponent answered with a goal, and the last chance for the U.S. fell on Wyatt. The run-down was tight. Ten feet before the goal, the Turk slammed into him and grabbed the goat. Wyatt wheeled his horse hard to the right and wrested the goat from the Turk’s grip, but the Turk was not beat. They came to the goal as two horses compressed against each other, and Wyatt threw the goat over the neck of the Turk’s horse. The goat turned once end-over and then landed on the rim, inches from the tar- get. The Turk, as he flew past, reached out a hand to snag one of its legs, and it fell to the dirt. The final score was Turkey 2, U.S. 1.

A referee commented that it was the best game of the tournament so far. It was the first kok boru match on record at the World Nomad Games to end with a shoot-out. But that didn’t make much difference to the team, and the doffing of gear and dressing of wounds in the barn afterward was a somber business. Ladd, his jersey sweated through and dirty, sat on a hay bale with a long face.

“You work so hard for something, put everything you have into it, risk your life for it, and it still doesn’t work,” he said. “That’s what’s hard. I’ve made eight-hour drives home after losing a rodeo, driving all night, and all you can think about is what you did wrong. That sucks. But this is gonna suck worse.”

Scott told the team to gather around him, and someone asked why.

“Why the fuck do you think. Because I have something to say,” he barked back. He leaned into his words, buoying the morale. “I’ve been chasing this dream for eight years. Eight years trying to play a game no one in the Western Hemisphere cares about or has even heard of. Today was the best we’ve done.”

The journey home was longer for some than others. Brendan went to Turkey to see his girlfriend. Jase went to Dubai for a week with a Kazakh woman he’d met on a dating app (“She has a PhD,” he told us). Some of us were three days getting home. In the Dallas-Fort Worth airport before our final flight to Santa Fe, I asked Wyatt what he thought of it all.

“Coolest thing ever,” he said. “That sound of the game, when you’re in the middle of it, there’s nothing in the world like it.”

This piece first appeared in the summer 2025 print issue of Outside Magazine. Subscribe now for early access to our most captivating storytelling, stunning photography, and deeply reported features on the biggest issues facing the outdoor world.