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The Heavy Events
This chapter is about the origins and the development of the disciplines that are known in nowadays as The Heavy Events. These events have always been the heart of any Highland Games and they all consist, in a wider sense, of throwing some implement eighter for width or for height. With a 16-pound hammer being the lightest implement thrown, and the other weights increasing to around 110 pounds for the average caber, that is why these events are called the Heavy Events. ... Heavy Events include the disciplines Stones of Strength, The Weights, Throwing the Hammer, Tossing the Caber, and Sheaf Tossing. The number and order of these events varies from Games to Games. In Scotland they include mostly five or six events and they usually contest each event separately, wether in other countries or at heavyweight championships there is mostly an athelete of the day who is the best in the sum of all events. ... The scoring of the throwing events is similar to track & field scoring of horizontal field events. The athletes get three throws total for the throwing events and the farest throw counts. The scoring of the tossing events is similar to the scoring of the track & field vertical events like pole vault and high jump. ... The contestants are eliminated from the tossing events after three consecutive misses. ... […] They were of two kinds, the Clach Cuid Fir, the Manhood Stone, a large stone weighting from a hundretweight upwards, or the Clach Neart […] which weighed only a matter of thirty pounds or so” (The Essential Guide to Highland Games, p. ... The clach neart, by contrast, was geneally thrown, or putted, the distance covered being the measure of this feat of strength (compare: The Essential Guide to Highland Games, pp. ... The Clach Neart is still an event at todays Highland Games similar to the shot put of modern track & field meetings, but the athletes use, in most of the gatherings, a stone instead of a steel ball, wether the Clach Cuid Fir is hardly ever to see at the modern Highland games.
At modern Highland Games there is mostly just the Clach Neart to find, which is named from Games to Games under another name. ...
“The stone may vary from around thirteen pounds to as much as twenty-eight pounds so that the distance thrown may vary enormously from one Games to the next. It is thus virtually impossible to make any real comparison for record purpose between the various Highland Games” (The Essential Guide to Highland Games, p. ... The stone is put from behind a trig, “a four-foot-six-inch wooden marker, which is six inches high” (The Essential Guide to Highland Games, p.
Approximate Word count = 2187
Approximate Pages = 8.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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