Sports in the Philippines

Sports in the Philippines is an important part of the country's culture. There are seven major sports in the Philippines. These are basketball, badminton, boxing, football, billiards, tennis and volleyball. Despite being a tropical nation, ice skating is a popular sport in the Philippines. Sports such as athletics, weightlifting, aerobics, and martial arts are also popular recreations.

Among the others there are: baseball, bowling, swimming, taekwondo, wrestling, underwater diving, kayaking, sailing, windsurfing, cockfighting, horse racing, Cricket, Australian rules football, motor racing, sepak takraw, and jai alai are also appreciated.

With the sport of cockfighting being wildly popular in the Philippines, attracting large crowds who bet on the outcome of fights between the birds, and the sport itself a popular form of fertility worship among almost all Southeast Asians. Such sports activity as the sport of cockfighting, related to ritual forms of worship as practices and rituals of ancient worship intended for the blessings of the supernatural, as "in Indus Valley and other ancient civilizations, mother goddess had been invoked for fertility and prosperity" which included that religious cockfight lay as a prime example of "cultural synthesis of 'little' and 'great' cultures" due to religious syncretisms causing the loss for some of religious significance and hence a sport, while remaining for some as a form of ‘fertility worship’ and still for others as Baal or Baalim.

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Wikipedia