mountain bike holidays and the guides ramblings

It was a scorchingly hot day that the STIHL Timbersports qualifying event in St. Johann in Tirol took place a couple of weeks back.  I like sport in virtually an guise it may take.  Watching any competition is usually good for a laugh.  To save a few pennies we went on the qualifying day just to get an idea of what a Timbersports event would be like.

There were six different events and fairly obviously they involved chopping wood with a selection of different instruments and in a number of different ways.  Having watched Manu’s father wield a chainsaw on a cold winters day in the forests behind the farm I was interested to see what this European field were capable of.

We only watched three of the events (we were late getting to the competition).

There was the event shown in these photos which was the ‘Single Buck‘.  One person shouting and oiling the erm buck.  Whilst the other skillfully sawing the timber in two.  Pretty impressive, taking only 30 odd seconds.  As always it was fun watching the odd mistake as well, for example, if the saw become stuck.

The other events we saw were ‘the STIHL Stock saw‘ and the ‘Underhand chop‘.  The first involving a ridiculously heavy chainsaw and the later a huge axe which the competitor had to try their best not to chop their own feet off with!

The crowd were getting into it with the Dutch and Germans leading the vocals and drum / cow bell banging.  The continual supply of beer provided by the STIHL waitresses probably helped to get crowded hear above the sounds of the chainsaws.

So would be return? One for the lads I think.  Claim a row of seats, settle back and get into the swing of things (with the beer and singing at least).  It looks like we’d need to sponsor a nation though as there weren’t exactly a large number of British competitors in the qualifiers.  Maybe they all made it though to the finals without our knowledge.  Also I need to see what the other three events are like.  Surely the ‘Standing Block chop‘, the ‘Springboard‘ and the ‘Hot Saw‘ would be able to provide some more Timbersport entertainment.

   We added this post on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 3:42 pm.

You can follow our blog feed for all the upandDownhill mountain bike holiday news. Email updates available as well, check out the sidebar.