Sports in Iranian History: Polo, the Zurkhaneh and Wrestling

Sport in Iran has a long and unusual history. Ancient Persian nobles were trained in riding, archery and hunting; polo, chowgan, was the court game of Sasanian and Safavid kings; and the zurkhaneh, the “house of strength”, joined wrestling and club-swinging with poetry and religious devotion. Modern sports arrived in the early 20th century, and since then wrestling and football have become the two great sporting passions of the country.

For the sports Iranians play and watch today, see sports in Iran. This page tells the history.

Riding, archery and the truth

Herodotus says that Persian boys were taught only three things between the ages of five and twenty: to ride, to shoot the bow and to speak the truth. Xenophon’s idealised account of Persian education in the Cyropaedia adds hunting as training for war. Achaemenid kings advertised their own skill: Darius I says on his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam that he was a good horseman, a good bowman and a good spearman. Royal hunting parks, the paradaida, were game reserves as well as gardens (see Achaemenid gardens and paradise).

Chowgan: the game of kings

Polo is the most famous Iranian contribution to world sport. Its Persian name, chowgan چوگان, is the word for the curved mallet. Middle Persian texts list it among the skills of a young noble, and in the Shahnameh the hero Siyavash plays a match against the Turanians at the court of Afrasiab. The page on polo and Sasanian sports covers the game at the Sasanian court.

From Iran the game spread west to Byzantium, where emperors built a polo ground in Constantinople, and east to Central Asia, China and India. In Safavid Isfahan the great square, Naqsh-e Jahan, served as a polo field, and its stone goalposts still stand at either end. Shah Abbas watched matches from the Ali Qapu palace. The game survived in north-eastern India, where British officers learned it in Manipur and Assam in the mid-19th century and carried the modern form around the world. In 2017 UNESCO inscribed Iranian chowgan, played with music and storytelling, on its list of intangible cultural heritage.

Chess and nard

Board games were the sports of the mind. Chess came to Sasanian Iran from India in the 6th century as chatrang, and Persian gave the game words it still uses worldwide: shâh, king, and shâh mât, “the king is helpless”, which became checkmate. A Middle Persian text tells how the minister Bozorgmehr solved the riddle of chess sent by an Indian king and in reply invented nard, the ancestor of backgammon. Far older gaming boards survive from Bronze Age Iran, including one with pieces and dice from Shahr-e Sukhteh.

The zurkhaneh: house of strength

The zurkhaneh زورخانه is a low, domed gym with a sunken octagonal pit, the gowd. Its athletes, the pahlavâns, train together to the beat of a drum and the chanting of the morshed, who sits in a raised alcove and recites the Shahnameh, Sufi verse and praise of Imam Ali. The exercises use heavy wooden clubs (mil), an iron bow hung with chains (kabbâde) and wooden shields, and they end with spinning (charkh) and wrestling.

Its origins are debated. Some Iranian writers trace it to pre-Islamic warrior training or to resistance against Arab rule, but there is no direct evidence for this. Most historians link it to the urban brotherhoods of chivalry, javânmardi (Arabic futuwwa), of the later Middle Ages. Its patron is Pahlavan Mahmud, known as Puriya-ye Vali, a 14th-century wrestler and poet from Khwarazm. Zurkhanehs are clearly documented from the Safavid period and were common in Qajar towns, where a pahlavan was expected to be not only strong but modest and generous. UNESCO inscribed the Pahlavani and zurkhanei rituals in 2010.

Wrestling: koshti

Wrestling, koshti کشتی, grew from the zurkhaneh and from regional folk styles such as the belt wrestling of Khorasan and Gilan. When Iran turned to international freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling after the Second World War, it found its greatest sporting success. Gholamreza Takhti (1930–1968) won Olympic gold at Melbourne in 1956 and silver in 1952 and 1960, but Iranians remember him as much for his modesty and his help for earthquake victims; his death in 1968, officially a suicide, is still mourned and debated. Wrestling has brought Iran more Olympic medals than any other sport.

Modern sport arrives

Football, gymnastics and athletics came in the early 20th century through mission schools, the British oil company in Khuzestan and Iranians educated abroad. An Iranian fencer competed in the Paris Olympics of 1900. Under Reza Shah’s reforms physical education became part of state schooling and scouting was promoted as part of building a modern nation. Iran has sent teams to every Summer Olympics since 1948, apart from the boycotted Games of 1980 and 1984, and Jafar Salmasi won the country’s first medal, a bronze in weightlifting, in London that year.

The late Pahlavi state invested heavily. Tehran hosted the 1974 Asian Games, the first held in West Asia, at the new Aryamehr stadium, renamed Azadi after 1979. The national football team won the Asian Cup in 1968, 1972 and 1976 and reached its first World Cup in 1978. Skiing developed at resorts such as Dizin, opened in 1969.

Sport in the Islamic Republic

After the revolution sport was reorganised under Islamic rules. Women continued to compete in some sports with full covering, but were barred from watching men’s football in stadiums from the early 1980s. After the death of Sahar Khodayari, a fan who set herself on fire in 2019 after being charged for trying to enter a stadium, FIFA pressed Iran to admit women, and limited access followed. Kimia Alizadeh became the first Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal, a bronze in taekwondo at Rio in 2016; she later left Iran and competed for the Refugee Olympic Team.

Football remains the great national passion. The 2–1 victory over the United States at the 1998 World Cup in Lyon set off street celebrations across Iran, and the team has qualified for several World Cups since. Weightlifting (Hossein Rezazadeh, gold in 2000 and 2004), wrestling and taekwondo have provided most Olympic medals. Sport has also become a stage for politics, from celebrations that turned into protests to players declining to sing the anthem during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022.