Stone Throwing With Flower Power

It’s a rare opportunity when I guy can put on a powder blue shirt with a edelweiss flower pattern and come off as more masculine, so when I heard about the opportunity to do just that I immediately signed up for the stone throw competition at the 2010 Eidgenössiches Schwing- und Älperfest (ESAF) in Frauenfeld. After all, what is more masculine than seeing who can throw a giant rock the farthest.

Before I explain how the competition went, let me explain a little about the ESAF. The event is the Olympics of traditional Swiss sports. It is held every three years and the main attraction is schwingen, a form of wrestling that is the Swiss national sport and traces its roots back hundreds of years in the Alps. Rather than explain the rules, I suggest you check out this video from the last ESAF in 2007. As you can see, it is an extremely unique and interesting sport to watch and even more fun to watch in person.

It is the environment at ESAF, in addition to the sport, that makes it one of my favorite sporting events to attend. The wrestling arena is packed with nearly 50,000 fans. While tickets have been sold out for months, an equal number of people come without tickets to fill the enormous beer halls showing the matches in the huge grounds surrounding the stadium. Think Super Bowl meets Oktoberfest. Over the course of the two day event over 130,000 bratwurst and 200,000 liters of beer are consumed. It is also a cultural event, with many people wearing traditional Swiss dress and various yodeling groups make their way around the grounds. Perhaps best of all is that the winner becomes a household name and takes their unique share of the $750,000 prize purse: Arnold, a three year old 5’4″ angus bull weighing in at 2,500 pounds.

There is no stadium in Switzerland big enough to host this event, especially in the more rural cities where schwingen is the most popular, so the stadium is a temporarily built hexagon with seven sawdust circles in the middle. Seating is by region, so when a wrestler from Bern wins, one section of the hexagon rises to its feet with elation. When a crowd favorite like stocky 39-year old Hans-Peter Pellet wins, the whole stadium erupts at once and can be heard for miles around.

Throwing the 20kg stone. The other stone weighed four times as much.

In addition to the wrestling, two more sports are contested: the obscure hornussen and the stone throw (Steinstoß). There are several varieties of the stone throw, from 20-kilogram to the famous 83.5-kilogram Unspunnenstein. I held my own with the 20-kilogram stone. It is thrown with an approach like the javelin, so I was able to utilize my speed to throw just short of 7 meters. I finished in the top 20 out of more than 70 competitors. My friend, and former national team member in the shot put, Urs Hasler won the competition with a throw of 8.98m. He was just 3cm short of the Swiss record.

I did not hold my own with the Unspunnenstein. In fact, it kicked my ass. Stones do not become legendary if they are easy to throw, and the Unspunnenstein is definitely a legend. It has been thrown for more than 200 years and it made tabloid headlines when it was stolen and vandalized by separatists in the 1980s (today’s stone is a replica since the vandalism reduced the weight). Sometimes I think I am strong, but things like the Unspunnenstein quickly remind me that I am not. I may be able to do seemingly an infinite number reps of twists with 30-kilograms, but that strength has no correlation to throwing stones. With the Unspunnenstein, I needed upper body strength, which I unfortunately do not train for. On my first attempt I hit my chin trying to lift it over my head and then dropped the stone leaving a nice bruise on my chin and an abrasion on my chest where it must have hit on the way down (my memory is fuzzy since I held my breath too long during the lift). Fearing a headline along the lines of “Stupid American adds to Unspunnenstein history by dropping  the 83.5kg stone on his head”, I decided to skip the running approach on my second attempt and instead did a stand throw of just two meters. It took more than three meters to make the nationally televised final.

Still, it was a great experience. Not only did I get to join an elite group of people that have thrown the Unspunnenstein, but I love trying new things and learning more about Swiss culture, and this allowed me to do both while wearing the traditional Swiss edelweiss shirt. In addition, I think I got more publicity through the stone throw than I have in the past few years throwing the hammer. I was called up on Thursday and asked to do an interview with Radio24 in Zürich since I was the only competitor from Zürich at ESAF. In addition, I did an interview on Saturday with national radio station DRS3 and a newspaper (I will provide links to the interviews when they become available). While I definitely am not a natural at stone throwing, I hope to try it again and perhaps do another competition or two in the coming weeks. If nothing else, I’ve already earned more money as a stone thrower in one day than I have in a decade of throwing the hammer.

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