Over the last decade, photographer Sophie Stafford has documented the World Nomad Games twice, first in 2018 in rural Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan, and most recently in the bustling metropolis of Astana, Kazakhstan. While the spectacle of the games and its ancient competitions, including horseback archery, bone tossing and hunting with eagles, continue to capture the imagination of audiences, Stafford’s poetic images are more concerned with the subtle cues that trace our changing world. Here, she talks to writer Gem Fletcher about rituals, traditions and how the next generation of athletes is reimagining the games with their own contemporary influences.
In one of Sophie Stafford’s photographs from the 2024 World Nomad Games, a young wrestler stands proudly, waiting to compete. He looks directly into the lens, holding onto a white T-shirt, revealing a toned physique. His hair is tight-cropped, bright cyan kinesiology tape adorns his injured shoulder and his grey joggers are tucked into socks emblazoned with Lidl logos and a pair of Adidas slides. The young man’s style and casual ease feels somewhat at odds with the formal nobility of The World Nomad Games, where traditional attire and codes are in abundance.
The games offer the opportunity to see how all these individuals honor their traditions from different countries.
Untethered from its context, the photograph is ambiguous in time and space, but within Stafford’s project, the portrait marks a new era of the Nomad Games, where our hyper-connected world shows up in subtle yet symbolic ways. “I’m fascinated by the younger athletes reshaping these traditional competitions with their own modern influences,” says Stafford about the portrait. “It’s a representation of cultural transmission in action—where tradition isn’t static but is continually evolving. For me, it’s not really about the competitions, it’s about the people. Coming together in the games offers the opportunity to see how all these individuals honor their traditions from different countries worldwide. It’s an event full of contrasts as culture is constantly adapting.”
Stafford is not a sports photographer, but a storyteller who gravitates towards photography as a stealthy and pertinent means to trace the transitory and ephemeral minutiae of the present. “My intention isn’t to judge the value of cultural preservation or whether something is being lost or preserved,” she adds. “I’m interested in what people find important about their traditions today and how they chose to carry them forward in their own way.”
The World Nomad Games is a biannual Olympic-style competition in which countries from around the globe compete in nomadic traditions, particularly sports from Central Asia, which face erasure after decades of Soviet collectivization and then globalization. Today, the games are a multi-generational experience, where competitors range from teenagers who have had these traditions passed down from their elders, to older athletes who have mastered their craft.
The games include more than 30 events, from hunting with eagles to archery, bone tossing to wrestling and Kok-boru—a savage game in which eight players on horseback try to secure a goat carcass—or a dummy—off the ground and hurl it into a goal downfield, and once served as a training method for warriors on the battlefield. Every event is physically demanding and, in some instances, dangerous, but offers participants an opportunity to revive the historical identities of their nations so they are never forgotten.
Stafford first encountered the games on an assignment. In 2018, she traveled to the sandy resort town of Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan, to document the third iteration of the games. Flanked by mountains on the northern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, the rural location imbued her images with a nostalgic energy, rooting events in their native context. In sharp contrast, the modern metropolis of Astana, Kazakhstan, hosted the 2024 games with its science fiction-like skyline and Norman Foster-designed shopping mall, signaling the organizer's aspirations for the event’s future.
“The games felt more commercial this year,” Stafford tells me about the move to Astana. “The events took place in modern arenas, there were more corporate sponsorships and team uniforms were more formal. The games are also more inclusive, with more women competing every year. The traditions still felt important, although I could feel this push to merge them with modernity, which gave the event an almost futuristic feel compared to 2018. This tension fascinated me as it provided a way to explore the evolution of the games and its cultural implications.”
This incongruous tension is the aesthetic force of Stafford’s work. In foreboding diptychs such as a portrait of a falconer with their beloved eagles astutely sequenced by an image of a glistening skyscraper (highly transparent glass buildings cause devastating collisions for billions of birds every year) or a billboard depicting a utopian vision of nature set among a backdrop of Asana’s urban streets, Stafford invites the viewer to linger on transitional moments.
As an image maker, Stafford isn’t interested in the spectacle, but instead, seeks out quiet and intimate observations taken from the margins that together create a revelatory perspective, on both the Nomad Games and our ever-changing world.