Tossed Like a Sheaf
The Highland Games host the Scottish Heavy Athletics World Championships in a new home
Members of the St. Andrew’s Society of Maine got some really good news and some really bad news around the same time and in the wrong order.
The good news came first. After hosting the annual Maine Highland Games and Scottish Festival for decades, the group’s event was chosen as the venue for this year’s Scottish Heavy Athletics Men’s World Championships!
The bad news: Last fall, Thomas Point Beach and Campground, a family-owned business in Brunswick that had long been the festival’s venue, was sold to Modern America Campgrounds (MAP), a conglomerate that owns over 30 campgrounds in New England and New York, mostly in Maine and New Hampshire. The new owners informed the Scottish cultural organization that they weren’t interested in hosting the games or the festival this summer.
Following the sale, organizers of the popular Thomas Point Bluegrass Festival called it quits after 45 years, and both the Maine Folk Festival and the Point Reggae Music and Arts Festival were canceled. With athletes from around the world already planning to travel to Maine for the Heavy Athletics Championships, the St. Andrew’s Society was under heavy pressure to find a new home with enough space for parking, camping, and safely hurling very heavy objects.
Shari Rodden, secretary of the St. Andrew’s Society and co-organizer of the Maine Highland Games, said it’s a huge honor and a big expense to host the world championships, but donors and sponsors stepped up to cover the cost, and the folks in charge of Windsor Fairgrounds “really stepped up” by making their venue in the small town east of Augusta available on Aug. 16 and 17. The annual Windsor Fair starts the following weekend, which doesn’t leave a lot of turnaround time for break-down and set-up, but the date for the championships had already been set. The Society plans to make Windsor Fairgrounds the festival and games’ new home, but will schedule the event on a different weekend in future years.
Rodden said losing Thomas Point Beach has been “a blessing in disguise.” Although the organizers would’ve liked to have had more notice before MAP kicked them out this year, the event had outgrown the Brunswick location. Windsor Fairgrounds offers much more parking, better restroom facilities, and a more central location for the heavy athletic events.
That’s important, because when you’re throwing stones, hammers and trees around, you need a lot of space. At Thomas Point Beach, those competitions were held a fair distance away from the festival to ensure crowd safety. In Windsor, there’s a racetrack with an infield that provides plenty of space to throw heavy stuff and safely watch it fly.
The rules of Scottish Heavy Athletics are refreshingly simple. It basically comes down to throwing or pushing a very heavy thing farther or higher or straighter than one’s competitors can. In brief, the games include:
• Sheaf Toss – Use a pitchfork to throw a 20-pound bag of straw over a crossbar that’s incrementally raised until the winner is determined.
• Caber Toss – Lift a tree trunk (caber) and hold it upright, then run and toss it upward and forward end over end. The throws are judged by how straight the caber lands. (Unlike fussy modern sports that standardize the size and weight of a game’s central object, cabers can be between 16 and 22 feet long and weigh between 100 and 180 pounds.)
• Hammer Throw – Without moving one’s feet, throw a 22-pound hammer attached to a four-foot handle. Wind-ups over the head are permitted (and highly encouraged by spectators).
• Stone Put – Like shot put, but with a big rock. Athletes competing in Open Stone Put can move as they throw the 16-to-22-pound rock, but those hurling the Braemar Stone, which weighs between 20 and 26 pounds, must do so from standing position.
• Weight for Distance and Height – For distance, athletes throw a 56-pound iron weight connected by a short chain to a ring handle. For height, the same weight is directly attached to a ring handle and thrown over a crossbar.
The games are, of course, just one of the festival’s many attractions. There’ll be bagpipes and dancing, collies and sheep, and whisky and haggis in abundance to give attendees the experience of traditional Scottish culture and rural life.
“No disrespect to Ren fairs,” Rodden said, referring to Renaissance fairs, “but they’re all over the place. This is the real deal.”
— Tom Major
Toss ideas for future sports coverage to Tom Major at leagueofbollards@gmail.com.