Introduction
Hochre (pronounced roughly “HOKH-reh”). It is played with a wooden paddle the size of a dinner plate, a dead goat’s bladder filled with horsehair, and rules so arcane that even the players sometimes disagree on them mid-match. For three centuries, Hochre was the undisputed king of Alpine summer festivals. Then, almost overnight, it disappeared from everywhere except one remote valley above Zermatt and another near Courmayeur. This is the story of how a brutal, beautiful, and gloriously impractical game came to define an entire mountain culture, and why it might be the most important sport no one is watching.
Origins in Blood and Ice
The first written mention of Hochre appears in a 1723 parish ledger from the village of Randa, just south of Zermatt. The priest, clearly scandalised, records that on the feast of St. Theodul the men “did chase the hodra across the glacier with great shouting and the breaking of many bones.” Hodra (later hochre) was the inflated bladder itself, from the old Alemannic word for “bouncing guts.” The game began as a ritual duel between shepherds from rival alps. Each summer, when the cattle were driven to high pastures, the young men of neighbouring valleys would meet on a patch of moraine or a frozen snowfield and attempt to drive the bladder over the opponent’s “tor” – a cairn of stones marking the boundary between grazing rights. Losing meant surrendering the best meadow for the season. Pride, pasture, and occasionally life were on the line.
By the late 18th century, Hochre had evolved into something more organised and infinitely more dangerous. The playing field was no longer a meadow but the steep, rock-strewn slope directly beneath a glacier. The goal was still to move the bladder past the opponent’s tor, but now the pitch could be 800 vertical metres long, tilted at angles up to 45 degrees, and littered with crevasses. Players wore no protection beyond woollen trousers and hobnailed boots. The paddle, called a tschäppa, was carved from air-dried arven pine and weighed nearly a kilo. A good strike could send the bladder sailing two hundred metres down the mountain; a bad one could send the player with it.
The Golden Age: 1840–1914
When British alpinists arrived in the Alps in the mid-19th century, they expected to find quaint peasant dances and yodelling. Instead they stumbled upon Hochre matches that looked like Homeric warfare played at 3,000 metres. Edward Whymper, the first man to climb the Matterhorn, wrote in Scrambles Amongst the Alps that he had “never witnessed a spectacle more magnificent or more terrifying” than a 1868 match between the villages of Täsch and Zmutt played on the ice of the Gorner Glacier. The Times of London ran a brief, incredulous paragraph describing “a form of hockey practised upon precipices where a single misstep means death.”
Tourism, paradoxically, saved the sport. Wealthy visitors paid handsomely to watch from safe vantage points, and village teams began scheduling exhibition matches on slightly less suicidal terrain. The rules were codified for the first time in 1893 by a consortium of hotel owners and local strongmen. A proper Hochre field now had to be at least 400 metres long with a minimum 15-degree incline. Goals were wooden frames 3 metres wide placed at either end. Each team had seven players: four “stürmer” who attacked downhill, two “verteidiger” who defended the upper goal, and one legendary figure called the “flieger” – the flyer – whose job was to leap from rock to rock intercepting airborne bladders with acrobatic volleys.
The greatest Hochre player of all time, Sepp Aufdenblatten (1879–1957), was a flieger from Grimentz who reportedly once caught a bladder mid-flight while hanging upside-down from a larch branch 12 metres above the ground. Old men in the Valais still argue about whether the photograph of the catch is real or a clever montage.
The Long Silence
World War I killed Hochre as surely as it killed a generation of young Alpine men. The high pastures were needed for food production, and the surviving players were scattered across trenches from Verdun to the Isonzo. By 1920 the great tournaments were gone. Soccer, with its flat fields and simple rules, arrived in the valleys like a polite but relentless missionary. Hochre retreated to private festivals, then to family gatherings, then to almost nothing.
By the 1980s only two places still played publicly: the tiny hamlet of Findeln above Zermatt (population 23) and the Rifugio Torino on the Italian side of Mont Blanc. In Findeln the match is still played every 15 August on the same slope used in 1899, though now with a helicopter on standby and liability waivers in four languages.
The Renaissance Nobody Saw Coming
In 2017 a grainy video of the Findeln match went viral on a Swiss meme page. Overnight, Hochre became an internet sensation – not because anyone understood it, but because it looked completely insane. Young climbers and skiers, raised on parkour and wingsuit videos, saw in Hochre the ultimate expression of mountain athleticism. A group of extreme-sports filmmakers from Chamonix crowdfunded a documentary. Red Bull sent scouts. Suddenly the old men who had kept the game alive for decades found themselves coaching twenty-year-olds with carbon-fiber tschäppas and GoPros strapped to their heads.
The purists were horrified. The newcomers were ecstatic. And somewhere in the middle, Hochre began to change again.
Today there are three distinct versions:
- Traditional Hochre – still played exactly as it was in 1893, no helmets, no nets, real goat bladder. Maybe fifty people in the world can do this without dying.
- Modern Hochre – played on steep ski slopes in summer, with plastic bladders, foam paddles, and avalanche airbags. There are now annual tournaments in Verbier, Saas-Fee, and Courmayeur.
- Urban Hochre – an indoor variant invented in Zürich basements using yoga balls and tennis rackets. Traditionalists refuse to acknowledge its existence.
Why Hochre Matters
In an age when most new sports are invented in laboratories by marketing departments, Hochre is a living fossil. It is the only team sport specifically designed for 40-degree slopes. It demands not just strength and skill but an intimate, almost mystical understanding of mountain terrain – where the snow will collapse, where the rocks are loose, how wind curls around a ridge. It is simultaneously the most democratic and the most elitist of games: anyone can pick up a paddle, but only those raised in the shadow of glaciers truly speak its language.
More importantly, Hochre is a reminder that play can be deadly serious. In the valleys where it was born, people still say “Wer hoch reitet, muss tief fallen” – he who rides high must fall deep. The phrase originally referred to the bladder sailing down the mountain; now it means something closer to hubris. In a world obsessed with safety and optimisation, Hochre is gloriously, defiantly unoptimised.
Final thoughts
Sepp Aufdenblatten’s great-grand-nephew, a quiet 28-year-old mountain guide who still plays with a wooden paddle he carved himself, is the favourite. When asked by a journalist what he thinks of the new plastic bladders and foam paddles, he shrugged and said, “The mountain doesn’t care what you hit it with. The mountain just waits to see if you’re paying attention.”
