On Saturday the All England Stone Skimming Championships will take place at the southern tip of Windermere. It is a competition superficially without great merit yet one that, if taken moderately seriously, offers a genuine test of both inherent ability and acquired technique – kind of like the Great British Bake Off, though in this event the dreaded soggy bottom is a sad inevitability.
The world record stands at 107.37m, though the mark is as yet unratified by Guinness, who have a category for the most skips (88) but none, puzzlingly – given that this is something that millions have tried, and that they do have a record for the most steps walked down by a dog facing forwards while balancing a glass of water on its head, which is not – for distance.
An event was organised in May precisely “because people were always asking what the record was and we didn’t have one”, at which Dougie Isaacs of Blairgowrie, who has won seven world championships including the past three, if you’ll excuse the pun, on the bounce, emerged simultaneously disappointed – “There were a lot of ripples and stuff which slows your stone right down. I was desperate to do 130-plus” – and victorious. “Dougie is a tall, willowy chap. His technique almost seems effortless,” one rival competitor told the Perth Courier. “He sort of flicks his arm and away he goes.” Cumbrians will be able to see for themselves, as for the first time Isaacs will be demonstrating his skills at Windermere, along with reigning champion Kevin Waltham – who will surely have to improve on last year’s winning throw of a paltry 86m – and veteran Ron Long, who won four times in five years between 2009 and 2014.
Somehow the Olympics has managed to get by without stone skimming. It does have events that involve propelling 2kg metal frisbees, 2.6m-long cocktail sticks and 16lb cannonballs both with and without a grip attached using 122cm of steel wire, so can argue that throwing is pretty much covered, and those people who scurry around the infield with giant tape measures might not be keen on donning bathers.
Still, clearly stone skimming is a close relative of proper Olympic disciplines, different mainly because you have probably tried it and know yourself to be useless, unlike, for example, the discus, which you have probably not tried but at which you assume yourself to be useless.
The magic of stone skimming, and what sets it apart from Olympic throwing events, is that it is fairly obvious that it should be impossible. Every skip is a victory of optimism over logic. Its magic is mitigated only by the fact that at some point humans observed this minor miracle and decided, as they do, it would be a good idea to use it to blow stuff up and kill each other. Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bombs remain celebrated for their success and his ingenuity, and more than 60 years later detract only slightly from the wonder of successfully convincing a stone not to sink.
Great sport often comes down to the battle between human and gravity. Perhaps this is why the trampoline competition, when humans are essentially given a temporary gravity-reversal machine and encouraged to show off a bit, is the most unremittingly joyful in the Olympics. Full-time trampolinists are the athletic equivalent of travel writers, wine buyers and ice cream tasters, in somehow having translated simple enjoyment into actual remuneration. There can be no doubting the dedication involved in preparing one’s body to run a marathon, to cycle up a mountain or to swim 10km in choppy waters, but the trampoline lacks the same fear factor. Without wishing to belittle the efforts of the world’s elite trampolinists, which are evidently considerable, there is a reason why kids’ parties frequently feature bouncy castles and only rarely involve rowing machines.
A few athletes have mastered gravity without the need for costly apparatus and in so doing have literally ascended into legend. Among the most celebrated are the handful of footballers who seem able to float for longer than seems particularly fair, like a greedy uncle at an airborne buffet. Stanley Matthews delightfully wrote of Stan Mortensen that “once airborne, it was as if the thumb and first finger of the right hand of the good Lord had reached down, nipped the shirt on his back and held him there”. The former Bolton and Newcastle forward Wyn Davies was not particularly prolific but was so aerially gifted that he became known simply as The Leap; in basketball Michael Jordan was rechristened His Airness. “When I’m in the air,” he once said, “sometimes I feel like I don’t ever have to come down.”
Scientists have inevitably studied the phenomenon and provided answers of varying degrees of credibility. Cristiano Ronaldo, whose jumping header against Wales at this summer’s European Championship appeared aided somehow, was once tested by experts who concluded that “when he jumps high he tucks his knees and his legs up under his buttocks” which “has the effect of raising his centre of gravity temporarily” and “gives the impression of hanging in the air”. A member of the department of astronautics at the US Air Force Academy announced of Jordan that “the application of his muscle power in the vertical plane produces a low-altitude earth orbit”. Boffins have also been hard at work to ensure that a skimming stone is not, as Bob Dylan so nearly sang, a complete unknown, concluding that a combination of power, angle and spin is key. And maybe, and most important of all, just a little bit of magic.
