Swimrun began with a bar bet in 2002 on the island of Utö in Sweden's Stockholm archipelago: four friends raced to Sandhamn, swimming from island to island and running across each one. In 2006 the challenge became the ÖtillÖ race, Swedish for "island to island".
📍 India
Carrom, where players flick a striker to knock wooden discs into the board's corner pockets, comes from India. Maharajas played it in their palaces, and a carrom board with a glass surface still survives in a palace in Patiala.
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📍 London, England
The first rubber balloons were made in London in 1824 by the scientist Michael Faraday, who pressed two sheets of raw rubber together to hold hydrogen for his experiments. A year later Thomas Hancock was selling them as do-it-yourself toy kits.
📍 Melbourne, Australia
In rogaining, teams with a map and compass hunt for as many checkpoints as they can in up to 24 hours. The sport was founded in Melbourne in 1976, and its odd name comes from three founders: ROd, GAIl and NEil Phillips.
📍 Geesthacht (near Hamburg), Germany
Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel developed dynamite in 1866–67 at his Krümmel factory on the Elbe near Hamburg, taming nitroglycerin by soaking it into kieselguhr, a porous earth. He patented it in 1867.
📍 Taranto, Italy
The name comes from Taranto in southern Italy, home of a wolf spider whose bite was popularly blamed for 'tarantism', a frenzy said to be cured by dancing. English later gave the name to big hairy American spiders.
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📍 Venice, Italy
Carpaccio was created at Harry's Bar in Venice by Giuseppe Cipriani for a countess whose doctors had told her to avoid cooked meat. He named the paper-thin raw beef after Vittore Carpaccio, a Venetian painter known for his rich reds.