Bushell's Best Bits - Everything You Needed To Know About The World's Craziest Sports. Mike Bushell
many disciplines in this sport. From the behind the leg catch, the under the leg, to the tunnel catch, eagle catch, Hackney sack catch and one hand behind the back catch. There are many ways to score points. Adam was like a ballerina: spinning, throwing, and jumping. This was the easy part. To up your game, you can throw two boomerangs at the same time and attempt a pair of catches. In competitions, you also score points for accuracy. The less you have to move from your throwing position to make the catch, the higher your mark.
At first, mine were doing their best to fly away for good. I narrowly missed a lady walking her dog, who was oblivious to the swirling stick stalking her hat, while another ended up in a tree. I needed to listen to Adam more carefully.
‘Mike, you need to make your hand into more of a fist,’ he reiterated. ‘Then hold the boomerang in place with the edge of your thumb. You have to make sure you keep it upright too, as vertical as possible. Then take your right arm back, step forward with your left foot and throw as hard as you can.’
It’s a magical feeling when the boomerang turns for the first time. It is as if you have trained your own raptor, and it’s coming back because it wants to sit on your hand. Lucy and the other beginners were having to move even less to catch theirs. ‘It’s quite hard to judge where it’s going to land, as it seems to change and slow up at the last minute,’ said one girl, who added that it’s really good for keeping you on your toes and moving you around.
Even more so when you move away from the trick catching and accuracy competitions. In the fast catch discipline, you have to make as many catches as possible in a minute. In this event, special faster boomerangs are used and can fly back to you at 70 miles per hour. The long distance challenge involves getting the boomerang to travel as far as possible. It only counts though if it comes back past you – in this one you don’t have to catch it. Manuel Schutz is the undisputed king of distance boomerang throwing. The world record he set in 1999 was 238 metres with a full return. No one else has come close to this in years.
One of the most fascinating competitions involves getting the boomerang to stay in the air for as long as possible. Most of us would be happy with 20 or 30 seconds. At competitions its commonplace to be waiting a whole minute for it to land, but Britain’s Adam McLaughlin remembers how he and a dog walker stood and watched in silent disbelief as the hovering and floating lasted for 2 minutes, 43 seconds.
What’s more the boomerang landed only 30 metres from the launch point. It was as if some Aboriginal spirit had brought it to life, and it was making the most of its freedom.
The so-called ‘Aussie Round’ is regarded as the ultimate test of skills, because each thrower has five attempts to get their boomerang to fly out of a 50-metre circle and then come right back to the point where the player is standing in the centre. For a novice this is the hardest test and it will take a lot more training before I can lie on my back in the park, get out a paper and wait for my little boomerang to come home.
I went away from Stevenage with my eyes open to a whole new world. There are no boundaries. It doesn’t matter how fit you are, how big or small, or how young or old you are. You can do it sitting down, and even practise from your bed. The only consideration needs to be other people who might not fancy having a haircut from a spinning boomerang, so please pick your throwing area considerately.
Two of the sport’s big names, Manuel Schutz of Swizterland and American Chet Snouffer, were again among the winners at the 2012 world championships, held over 10 days in Brazil, while there are also now regular competitions and training sessions held across the UK. If you want to watch and learn from the expert throwers like Adam, and need to know the best boomerangs to start off with, visit the home of the British Boomerang Society, www.boomerangs.org.uk
ROPE SKIPPING
The sound of beating wings echoed around the sports hall. I imagined a frantic bat, flitting past on a daring insect raid in the dusky protection of a summer’s evening. But the gentle noise was being chased by machine-gun tapping on the shiny floor. I widened my eyes, but still couldn’t see what was making this sound. The rope was going so fast.
I am not easily shocked, but I had sat down in awe to appreciate the skipping skills of former world and European champion Beci Dale. Her feet were just flirting with the floor, and the invisible rope circled her so quickly she managed 95 skips in 30 seconds. This was just four off the world record at the time, in 2009, although this has now gone up to 102 in just half a minute.
Like throwing a boomerang, rope skipping is another sport that tests you in ways you’d never imagine and yet is based on the simplest and cheapest bit of equipment: a length of rope. There is evidence of rope skipping in some cave paintings, but it was in 1940s America that it really took off as a children’s pastime, especially in towns and cities where there wasn’t much space or money. Even now a starter rope won’t cost you much more than £5.
But if you thought this was just something to do in the back yard or playground, then you don’t know your ‘double Dutch’ from your ‘toads’, or your ‘elephants’ from your ‘awesome annies’. It’s no wonder boxers use skipping as a training exercise, and footballers as a way of building up strength after injury, because it is one of the most dynamic workouts I have experienced. It is regarded as one of the best ways to improve your all-round fitness. But it’s no longer just a way to build up stamina for other activities. At an increasing number of clubs in the UK, it is now a sport in its own right.
I was warming up next to Beci and other members of the British team at the Studley club near Birmingham. I noticed what gymnasts they were. Lightweight, but remarkably strong. I was a heffalump in comparison. Yes I got into a rhythm and the rope was looping under my feet and over my head, but it was in slow motion, thudding heavily onto the floor, while Beci was levitating on a transparent cushion of air, so quick were her skips.
‘It’s my last 10 seconds that let me down. I start to fade and need to work on that to get the world record,’ she explained. Such speed comes from over 16 years of practise, several hours a day, sometimes seven days a week – and if you think that might get boring, there are plenty of tricks to spice up training. In fact there are over 1,000 tricks in competitive rope skipping that you can try to impress the judges with.
‘I love doing all the hard tricks, with the moving feet and flipping,’ explained one nine-year-old lad. ‘Doing the skills you have to use your hands as well as your feet,’ he added, as his friend, slightly older, performed a ‘toad’. This involved lifting up one leg and swooping the rope over, and then in a mesmerising figure of eight, sweeping it under the other leg. All the time the rope seamlessly cut through the air, like the trace of a sparkler on bonfire night.
This is only a basic move though. Most routines involve two ropes, hence you get ‘double Dutch’. Beci was keen to demonstrate a more complicated routine. Two teammates, one on either end, were drumming the air furiously to get the ropes spinning. Once up to speed, they were impossible to see so using her instinct, Beci cartwheeled through the eye of a needle and into the middle without disturbing the flow. She bounced and danced before somersaulting in the vortex and spinning out the other side. Such teamwork is what’s turned the British team into one of the best in the world, with gold medals in the double Dutch speed event at the 2012 world jump rope championships in Washington DC: competing against such countries as USA, France, Japan, Canada and Germany.
Their head coach is Sue Dale. ‘It’s so exciting. People don’t realise the sort of things you can do. You’ve just seen the amazing acrobatics and speed, and people are always amazed,’ she says.
And I was amazed that in my first lesson, they managed to teach my flat feet to get into the groove. Admittedly my rope was turning much more slowly and I could see the gap I needed to jump through. But keeping in time with the beat of each loop I leapt into the middle and then one bounce, two bounces, three and four before on cue I pounced down onto the floor. Like a poor frog which has just been run over, I flopped my hands and feet off the floor and into the air to clear the rope as it swung low each time. I was a lolloping lizard who risked being lassoed in a python’s stranglehold if I was a split second out, but the cheers