Vasily Kamotsky does not so much slap his opponents as cudgel them with his massive palm. He was crowned the slapping champion at the Siberian Power Show, a competition so esoteric and objectionable that it seems tailor-made to be stumbled upon during a 3am YouTube binge.
However, Kamotsky was clear-eyed when it came to what he thought had prompted his sudden rise to prominence. “Two knockouts,” he said when reached by phone in his small town along the Trans-Siberian railroad. “I don’t think anyone had seen that before.”
Slapping championships are a relatively new curiosity in Russia, a display of tolerance for pain designed to enliven weightlifting shows that attract mainly men. Kamotsky was ambivalent about his sudden fame. “It’s not a sport, it’s a show,” he said.
Kamotsky, a farmer, had not even heard of the slapping championship when he and friends visited the strongman competition in the city of Krasnoyarsk. An avid fan of power-lifting, he said he was talked into participating in the competition by friends.
“There was a crowd watching us, probably about 1,000 people,” he said. He ended up with the nickname pelmen, a Siberian dumpling, because he told an MC that he liked to eat them. “I kind of walked into that one.”
Once the video went viral, people began to recognise Kamotsky on the street. Journalists have called from as far as Spain and Japan. Footage of him winning the championship has been featured on Evening Urgant, the country’s premier comedy talkshow, and he has received letters from fellow fans of the football club Spartak (as well as their rivals CSKA).
He has read some of the comments on YouTube, many of them critical. “Look, it got 2.8m views,” Kamotsky said. (It’s now up to more than 4m.) “Everybody on YouTube writes ‘They’re such idiots’ and ‘Why do this?’ But people are watching it and that means they must need it. They write negatively about it but they keep watching it.”
The clip fits neatly into a niche that may best be described as “bizarre videos from Russia”, a surprisingly productive subcategory of YouTube and Instagram content perhaps best exemplified by the account Look at this Russian. That account, which has 387,000 followers, featured a video with Kamotsky from the slapping championships shortly after his victory.
But the idea for the competition itself appears to have been imported from America. Organisers of the Siberian Power Show apparently took inspiration from a previous event in Moscow, whose organisers in turn had seen something similar online. Since at least 2015, an American trade show for tattoo enthusiasts, Ink Masters, has featured a “slap off”, which also features men being knocked out in raucous competitions.
Competitive slapping had even earlier been tipped as a kind of joke. A Fox Sports commercial in the US in the early 2000s referred to the Khabarovsk slapping championships as an example of an obscure sporting event that would not interest potential customers. “Sports news from the only region that you care about” was the slogan for the channel, as musclebound men slapped each other in the background.
The sport now has referees and smelling salts to help bring recipients of the attacks back to full consciousness. Kamotsky, who won 30,000 roubles, or £350, said he was not sure whether he would take part again.
“It feels like it’s taking away from everything else about the event,” he said, referring to the Siberian Power Show. “There are plenty [of events at the Power Show], but everyone has just been asking about the slapping.”