When wood chopping gets competitive
We can all see how it would happen: you want to prove you can chop wood faster than your brother or partner or ex, but here in the Basque country, they have taken that competitive instinct and turned it into a sport. And by sport I don’t mean a little bit of fun at a country fair, I mean a proper televised, with a coaching team, type sport.
We went to watch a tournament this weekend, in the ‘fronton’ in the nearby town of Azpetia. The ‘fronton’ is the court where the national game of ‘pelota’ is played (think squash without the racquet) and is as essential a part of a Basque town as are the church and porticoed town square we walked through to get there. It is like a public sports hall, but longer and thinner and with a stand of seats on one side.
The atmosphere when we arrived (a little late, so chopping was already underway) was electric. Three men in white trousers and different coloured sports vests were swinging their axes at trunks of wood, cheered on by a crowd of several hundred. Their first contest involved chopping a log set vertically before them so that the top half fell off the bottom half. Two sets of pen lines marked out horizontal ‘V’s on the trunks, meeting at a point in the middle, to indicate where they should aim their axes. It was the man in the red vest who halved his log first, but the other two competitors continued to aim blows at their own — they might not have won this round, but it was their cumulative times that would count over the length of the competition.
Their next round involved standing on a three-foot wide log, laid on its side as they swung the axe between their feet to be the first to chop this in two. A few strokes in and we started to notice the technique. Lifting the axe as high over his head as he could, the red-vested competitor would then bounce on his toes for a final bit of lift before swinging the axe down to the wood. His focus on technique made this look like a sport and not just a chore to provide fuel for the fire — and probably explains why he won this round, too.
While the wood choppers went to sip water and loosen shoulders, new competitors appeared in the arena. Dressed in blue with reinforced pads on the thighs, chest and shoulders of their outfits, and supportive black belts wrapped several times around their waists, these strongmen would take part in another traditional Basque sport — that of lifting stones.
As with wood chopping, this is another sport with its origins in rural “my dad’s stronger than your dad” style competitions between neighbouring farms and villages, but it too has moved into public arenas. The stones they lift are round, cylindrical, square or rectangular and weigh between 100kg and 212kg.
The first competitor stepped forward to where the stone rested on a padded mat, using his body to roll it upwards he lifted it to his shoulder before dropping it back down to the mat and doing it again. I winced for the judge’s toes, clad only in trainers and mere centimetres away from the edge of this mat. Then the lifter, picked up the stone again, and dropped it, and again, and again. In all he lifted his 115kg stone 26 times before the whistle blew to signal his time was up. His opponent went next, beating him by one lift in the same amount of time. They would be back to duel it out again with a bigger stone in the next round.
Female stone lifters came out next, to compete in a team lifting event, two against two. Their stones were round and while their feats of strength were impressive, I was so sidetracked by the fear that the stone of the first competitor would be lifted so far back on to her shoulder that it would roll on to the bare toes — yes, bare toes — of her team mate standing inches behind, that I almost failed to take note of the main event, the herculean effort of lifting.
The TV cameras were less distracted, however, and later, as we enjoyed a fabulous Basque meal in a restaurant with views over miles of green and forested land, we saw the event covered on the national Basque TV channel. The red wood chopper was crowned the victor — his trophy, as they always are for Basque competitions, was a traditional Basque beret embroidered with details of the contest he had won.
