The Saline Reporter
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
The Best Yet
Festival hosts Championships
By Jerry Hinnen, Staff Writer
PUBLISHED: July 10, 2008
In 2007, Saline Celtic Festival organizer Don Makins believed the festival offered its strongest field of competitors and most the exciting Highland Games competition yet.
Advertisement
Now, in 2008, he believes fans will get to see something even better.
On Saturday at Mill Pond Park, the festival will play host to the 2008 Masters World Championships of Scottish Highland Athletics. The championships are held annually in locations around the world, with Saline selected to host this year's edition over the bids of Sarnia, Ontario, and the Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois.
"We're very, very excited," Makins said this week. "We think it's going to be a real crowd-pleaser. These are the best athletes in this sport, for their age, in the world."
The Masters Championships are open only to athletes age 40 or older, who will compete across 12 different age — and gender — classes. Makins said more than 80 men and women, ranging in age from 40 to 70 and older, are expected to compete in Saline.
It will mark quite a departure from previous Highland Games competitions at the festival, which typically featured in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 athletes. To accommodate the change, Makins said, the competition area at Mill Pond Park has been reorganized to allow several events to operate at once. Whereas before the festival used only one setup for the weight-over-bar event, this year it will use four.
Makins added that the changes will allow fans to get closer to the action than they've ever been.
"There's going to be activity all around, all day," he said. "We think it's going to be spectacular."
Given the competition for the right to host the championships, it wasn't a sure thing the spectacle would find its way to Saline. But Makins said the decision-makers at Scottish Masters Athletics International had little doubt after a visit to Saline.
"Our organization and our city sells itself," he said. "We've been doing this for a long time and we know a lot about this kind of competition."
In addition to the new size and scale of the festival's Highland Games competition, longtime fans will be able to see two new events in the sheaf toss and Braemar stone.
In the sheaf toss, athletes use a pitchfork to hurl a bale or sack of straw over a set height (as in the weight-over-bar event), with the height increasing after each successful attempt. The Braemar stone is a forerunner of the Olympic shot put, in which athletes must hurl a round stone for distance without the aid of running or spinning.
But plenty also hasn't changed about the festival's Highland Games. Athletes will still compete in the popular caber toss, as well as in the stone put, two different weight-for-distance events, two different hammer tosses, and the weight-over-bar.
Another holdover will be popular announcer Frank Stasa, on hand once again to call the action.
Among those competing will be Geir Standal of Norway, winner of the 2007 Masters World Strongman championships; Mark MacDonald of Dumfries, Scotland, winner of Masters World Championships in 2004 (40-44) and 2006 (45-49); Alabama's Myles Wetzel, the defending 45-49 World Champion; New Brunswick, Canada's Dirk Bishop, a three-time defending World Champion; two-time 50-54 and 55-59 World Champion Bill Lefler; and two-time defending 40-49 women's World Champion Denise Houseman.
Competitors will hail from as a far away as Japan and Switzerland.
Staff Writer Jerry Hinnen can be reached at 429-7380 or jhinnen@heritage.com.
Not all stories are guaranteed to appear
online. The Web edition contains a reasonable
sampling of the print edition stories.
For the most complete news coverage, we invite you to
subscribe
to the print edition of the paper.
Expanded
Web
Coverage
TOP JOBS
