Festivals
Naadam, honestly: what the festival is actually like
Published 2 July 2026 · 6 min read
Wrestling, archery and a horse race run by children — plus where to stand, what it costs, and why the countryside version may be the better day out.
Naadam is held on 11–12 July and has been, in one form or another, for eight centuries. Officially it is three sports. In practice it is the two days a year when the entire country is doing the same thing at the same time.
The three games
Wrestling has no weight classes and no time limit — 512 men in one bracket, losing by touching the ground with anything above the knee. A round can take forty seconds or forty minutes. Winners perform the eagle dance around the flag before the next bout.
Archery is quieter and easy to miss: teams shoot at a wall of small woven cylinders at 65–75 metres, and the judges standing beside the target sing the score back down the range.
The horse race is the one nobody expects. It is run cross-country over 15 to 30 kilometres depending on the age of the horses, and the jockeys are children between five and twelve — light riders for the long distance. Thousands of horses, no track, and a finish line you feel through the ground before you see anything.
Where to actually be
The stadium in Ulaanbaatar is the ceremony, and tickets for the opening are genuinely hard to get. The horse race is not in the stadium at all — it finishes at Khui Doloon Khudag, about 40 km west, and that is where the day is.
Consider a countryside Naadam
Every province and most districts hold their own, usually within a week or two of the national one. There are a few hundred people instead of thirty thousand, you stand at the edge of the wrestling with nothing between you and it, and someone will hand you a bowl of airag. If your dates are flexible, we will point you at whichever one falls in the right week.
