Other Sports
Basketball has a high profile, while Ecuador's specialties include ecuavóley, a three-person variation of volleyball from the highlands of Ecuador. Bullfighting is practiced at a professional level in Quito, during the annual festivities that commemorate the Spanish founding of the city, and also features in festivals in many smaller towns. Rugby union is found to some extent in Ecuador, with teams in Guayaquil, Quito, and Cuenca. Pelota nacional, an indigenous racquet sport, is also played. Surfing is popular in some coastal towns. Winter sports are very popular up in the Andes mountains, where it is most available.
There is flourishing activity in non-traditional sports such as inline hockey, capoeira, mountain biking, motorbiking, whitewater kayaking, skiing, snowboarding, and paintball. Martin Davalos, from Pichincha, Quito, is a well-known accomplished AMA motocross and supercross dirtbike rider and racer. Some coastal resorts, particularly Montañita and Ayampe, have been developed as surfing centres. The 2005 World Rafting Championships were held on the Quijos River in Napo Province. Ecuador also hosted the 2007 Youth World Championship for rock climbing, held in Ibarra, becoming the first country outside of Europe or Asia to host the event.
Read more about this topic: Sport In Ecuador
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behaviour, attire, grace, learning and all their words aimeth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)