An Introduction to Scottish Athletics

Me and the mascot for the Commonwealth Games.

Scotland is good for a lot of things. Pretty buildings. Yummy food. Even better whisky and tea. Not excellent weather.

While most of the Northern hemisphere spent August stripping down to tank tops and sandals, Jeff and I were employing every article of our clothing to stay warm in Edinburgh. Inside our apartment.

Which meant that most days outside, I felt more like I was in Seattle in December. And I thought the Pacific Northwest had crummy summers.

It was one of those days that Jeff and I set out to watch Scottish sports. But not a round of golf, or a match of the ever so popular football.

Jeff and I arrived at a grassy field in North Berwick, just east of Edinburgh, around 11 am. The grass was moist under our feet from the constant rain, but it didn’t seem to hinder the hundreds of men and women marching back and forth with bagpipes.

We were in North Berwick for their local Highland Games. The Highland Games are events that take place throughout the summer, celebrating Scottish culture. At the Games, you’ll find things like bagpipe competitions and Scottish food. And people throwing immensely large and hefty objects.

Jeff had been looking forward to the games since we arrived in Scotland. Unbeknownst to me, Jeff seemed already schooled in the finer details of throwing heavy stuff. It might have actually been the entire reason he agreed the come to Scotland. I however, wasn’t familiar with any of the games before we arrived.

So for those of you like me, let me present Jeff, who will present:

An Introduction in the Highland Games, an Hour-by-Hour Breakdown of Our Day

Hour 1: Bagpipes and Dogs at 11:00

Clearly, capturing dogs was more important than capturing their owner’s heads in the photo.

Bagpipes. All. Day. Long.

No matter where we stood at the games, the drone of the bagpipes gave a constant feel of being in Scotland. Hundreds of bagpipe bands from around the world were here, and they were either preparing to compete,  competing at the moment, or recovering from competing. Which meant hundreds of bagpipes playing simultaneously every second of the day. Fortunately, we like bagpipes. -J eff

Hour 2: Waiting for the Heavy Events to start. First cup of tea to warm up.

The arsenal of heavy things that will be thrown at the games.

 

Hour 3: People throwing a metal ball

This was Laura. She was my favorite athlete.

It looks like shot-put, but it’s actually called stone-put. The athletes spin with great power to build momentum to propel a 20-pound cannonball as far as possible. This spinning creates a centrifugal pull on the kilts of contestants, allowing us to see their wee bits. However, the men wore high performance lycra shorts in these games.

After stone-put was throwing the Braemar Stone. It’s not pictured here, but it’s a lot like stone-put except now you’re throwing a 50 pound stone the size of 2 basketballs foraged from a quarry and you only have 1 step to build momentum to throw it. And it destroys the ground and small dogs when it lands.

Hour 4: More waiting. More bagpipes. 2^nd cup of tea. Still not warm.

Hour 4.5: Athletes takes a break for beer. (Who needs Gatorade, after all?)

You know how crossfit people love doing squats with kettle weights, holding them with both arms, swinging them low on squat and then forward at the apex of each thrust up? Well, they’re lazy and weak because they’re only doing half the job. Not pictured here is the full job, a.k.a. Weight Over The Bar, where 56 pound kettle weights are squatted and then thrown vertically over a high jump bar with one hand.

The bar is raised after each successive throw, and in the end the winner threw it over 15 feet in the air.

This was a long, grueling event which required a short break for rehydration. With Guinness.

Taking a break from hard work.

 

Hour 5: More heavy stuff goes air bound.

Welcome to weight throw. Where a heavy metal weight is attached to a chain and handle, and the athlete spins to throw it as far as possible with one hand. Both spirits and kilts rise in this event.

Throwing the original kettebell.

Similar to weight throw, but very different, is the Scot’s hammer. Where a spherical weight at the end of a wooden shaft is thrown as far as possible. The athletes face away from the field, using both arms to rotate the hammer to build momentum to throw it.

But there’s more to it than that – the centrifugal force created by rotating the hammer is enough to pull a massive 6’5″ Scottish highlander off his feet, so he wears special hammer throw boots with 7 inch blades on the toes. These blades dig into the ground and anchor him while he prepares a 22 pound hammer for its angelic flight of 42.5 meters across the field.

Hour 5.5: Emiko falls asleep next to a fence. Jeff panics thinking she’s fallen down a ditch.

While Jeff wandered around looking for me, I had fallen asleep against a barb wire fence where the high school kids were smoking pot.

 Hour 6: Break for batons. Third cup of tea. Tenth trip to the port-o-potty.

Break for the baton competition.

Hour 7: Logs!!!

Let’s be honest. Caber toss is the real reason I’m here. Athletes have the challenging task of first steadying a telephone pole vertically. Not a metaphorical really long log shaped like a telephone pole. But an honest-to-goodness, holes-in-it-for-telephone-wires, conic-at-the-bottom-for-inserting-in-the-ground, stamped-with-a-municipal-ID-for-identifiction-by-utility-workers-in-orange-reflective-safety-suits, North Berwick Municipal Telephone Pole.

But once you’ve steadied that pole, you have the joy of lifting it while steadying it.

And after that, you have the task of running forward with it.

And if you can actually get that far, you then throw it up in the air to flip it 180 degrees so it lands with the end you once held pointing away from you.

Logs! In the air! 

On first look, the heavy events may look like tactless acts of brute force throwing heavy things. More muscle = more points. But after witnessing it in person, it’s a display of incredibly technical athleticism and practice, all done in kilts, t-shirts, and hydrated with beer.

With that, you now know about as much as I (Emiko) and Jeff do about the Highland Games.  But the cool thing is, it doesn’t have to stop you from participating. We overheard one of the athletes talking, a younger American from Virginia, on our train ride home. That day was the first time he’d every tried any of the sports. Ever. So maybe he didn’t throw the log up in the air, but he still put on a fine showing. Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Oh, and one the sports – the discus I think – translates over to traditional track and field. Or “Atheltics” as I learned it’s called in the UK, when Jeff and I visited the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this summer.

More people throwing heavy stuff.

Celebrity sighting (Photo taken from some tabloid the day we went to the Commonwealth Games.)

The Commonwealth Games are like the Olympics for  countries that were once colonized or under British rule. They happen every four years and this summer they happened to be in Glasglow. Jeff and I boarded a bus for a day trip, where we enjoyed a morning of track and field.

Unlike the Highland Games, the sports at the Commonwelath Games were a little bit more traditional. But no less exciting.The Commonwealth Games also came with a side of celebrity. Like Kate Middleton. And a member of the St. Lucius Team, who Jeff and I stalked in Pound Stretcher (the dollar store of the UK) until he took a photo with us. And after that, Jeff and I pulled out our umbrella and headed back outside, into the torrential summer rain.

Yup, that’s us being creepers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: highland games, Scotland, travel, travel blogging