THE SPORT OF TEJO, WHERE SCORING IS DONE WITH GUNPOWDER.

THE SPORT OF TEJO, WHERE SCORING IS DONE WITH GUNPOWDER. John Otis had an article in the Wall Street Journal (December 5, 2018) about tejo, which the article says is the “Colombian national sport”. (The Colombian Congress in 2000 gave tejo the status of national sport with its own postage stamp.) The headline calls tejo “bocce with bombs”. The players throw 2 pound metal discs toward clay-filled pits “dotted with packets of gunpowder”. A variant of the the game was played by the Musca Indians before the Spanish conquest.

The game involves consuming notably large quantities of beer (which replaces chica, a fermented corn drink which accompanied tejo when the Musca Indians played the game).