Guatemalan village's crazy, drunken "Race of the Souls"

The riders begin preparing for the event the night of October 31. A chicken is sacrificed to bless the sandy track that snakes up a central road, and the competitors vow to abstain from sex. They spend the entire night drinking Gallo beer and a potent Guatemalan liquor called Quetzalteca. By the time the race begins the next morning, the riders are already intoxicated, and they’ll spend the rest of the day getting even more wasted—it’s what the ceremony demands—while riding back and forth on a track that goes from one end of the village to the other.

Ben Reilly wrote:Speaking of which, not many people know that there used to be just chicks and hens. Eventually somebody thought there should be an umbrella term for both, so they called them "chick-hens" which was gradually shortened to our modern-day term "chicken" by ...


None other than Sir Winston Churchill himself.