Hit the road, Jack! Lumberjills chip their way into timber sports : NPR

Samantha Graves, by Victor, NY, participates in the standing chop at the World Championships in Lumberjack 2025 in Hayward, Wisconsin.

MAAYAN SILVER / WUWM

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MAAYAN SILVER / WUWM

Hayward, Wisconsin – Each summer, thousands of people descend to this “large town” in northern Wisconsin, as some people call it. They come for local fishing and campsite, bars and restaurants decorated with taxidermia, and a large sculpture of 4 and a half years of a musk fish, a freshwater fish.

But the largest tourist draw in July is the world log championships, the local equivalent of the Olympic Games. The crowds fill the stands overlooking a cove of glass water, looking athletes from wood sports from all over the world’s swings, manue saws with transverse cutting and sprint through floating logs. This year’s competitors came from 16 states, Canada, Australia, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Spain and Wales to participate in the 65th annual championship.

An industry dominated by men has become an inclusive sport

Towards the turning point of the 20th century, the forest operating industry reigned supreme in the north of Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Michigan Superior Peninsula.

“This is really what allowed the Midwest to flourish,” explains the historian Willa Hammit Brown, author of Gentlemen of woods: American virility, myth and lumberjack.

“The recording of this land was one of the largest transformations [of the American landscape] in American history. “”

The Lumberjack World Championships bring spectators to the city in the north of Wisconsin Hayward, known for his outdoor leisure.

Katherine Kokal / Wuwm

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Katherine Kokal / Wuwm

The almost exclusively male labor has shot down trees, stacked logs and pushed them into the rivers. Women have mainly played a support role as cooks in forest camps. Thus, a wood sports competition can remind you of large types of Paul Bunyan, facial hair and flannel shirts.

Discuss again! This year, almost half of the competitors of the World Championships in Lumberjack, 45 of the 100, were women “Lumberjills”.

Some participate thanks to university programs, such as Erin Lavoie, a owner of the crossfit gymnasium in Spokane, Washington and 2024 Global champion. She was presented to the competitive lumberjack as a forest student at university, when she noticed a team that broke the wooden blocks in the corridor of one of its classes.

In the event of sneaky chops, 6 athletes run to be the first to hack their newspaper.

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MAAYAN SILVER / WUWM

“I wandered in one day [and said] “Hey, what are you doing?” Can I come and try it? And I fell in love immediately. I loved the challenge. My hands were bloody before I end, it probably took a day to end a block of wood. And I was addicted, ”she said.

Now Lavoie can cut a connection in less than 30 seconds and has seen a Less than 15. She won seven versatile titles, but was preceded this year by the Canadian Lumberjill Stephanie Naud.

A double -edged ax

The log bowl is built around an entrance to Lake Hayward which was used as a holding pond for the trees touched by the loggers in the 1800s. The white pine shot was stored in the water so that the logs do not dry and not crack before being shipped across the country.

Now, one side is the platform where sawing and chopping competitions take place.

Women do not compete in the 20 events, such as the speed rise of 60 feet and 90 feet, where competitors run and descended imposing posts. Although these events are open to women, they are very physically demanding and women have not entered until now.

But they participated in a transversal sawing for women and at the sneaky chopper Since 1994. For the sneaky chop, the athletes stand on small flat spots on horizontal logs. The advertiser shouts, “3-2-1 go!” And six athletes at the same time cut with the logs below them, cutting a V -shaped in both sides until they separate.

Lumberjills participated in the sneaky chop and women’s sawing events for the first time in 1994.

With the kind permission of Tina Marie Scheer

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With the kind permission of Tina Marie Scheer

In recent years, women have also started to participate in the Standing block chop, where the newspaper is vertical and 9 inches in diameter. This year, a competitor of Hayward, Kate Witkowski, exploded in her vertical newspaper in 21.17 seconds, a new female world record.

Samantha Graves has also established records in this event. Victor’s Lumberjill, New York, works in the office of a trees company. She says that some people have false ideas about what it means to be a wooden sports competitor.

“They will be like:” Oh, Sammy launches axes. “And then they just assume that I do, like the little axes in [axe-throwing] bar. So I try to explain to them that it is a little more than that. You know, we are professional athletes. “”

There is an ax launch event at the world championships in Lumberjack. But here, the competitors throw great double axes with a blade on each side.

Martha King, from Pennsylvania, is another star of this year’s competition. She explains that the foray of women in sawing and the chipping of women has evolved over time.

“It is not as if they had flowered overnight,” she said, “but I saw the evolution, I suppose, or the progression of it in recent years.”

It is a double -edged sword … or rather, ax.

“The earlier, it was a little easier to win,” she said. “”[But] This is what you want. You want intense competition. You want to raise the bar. You want people to push you. You want to push other people. This is how sport will grow. “”

Livi Pappadopoulos, 24, from the County of the butt, Wisconsin, participates in the female log, in which two athletes try to drop the log without touching.

Katherine Kokal / Wuwm

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Katherine Kokal / Wuwm

A log inheritance

On the other side of the cove is the dock of rolling and arrow rolling. The Boom Run event is a favorite of the crowd. The athletes sprint through eight newspapers floating in the water and connected by a rope.

In the log bearing, two competitors compete on the floating newspapers of Western red cedar, making the speed and steering speed to try to unbalance their opponent without touching themselves.

“When they [log-rolling competitors] Fall on their buttocks, which often happens, we like to say: “She has obtained a little cedar in her” “jokes Samantha Lasalle, director of events for the championships and competitor.

“Having a quick game of legs, a strong heart, a strong body of the body [helps]”She explains”, but a large part of the roller of the logs is also mental. It’s a popular sport, so it’s just, it relies on your mind [focus] And not only brute force like some of the cuts and sawing, when there is also the technique. “”

Aini Anderson, 16 years old (left), and Livi Pappadopoulos, 24 years (right) of the County of the Crosse, Wisconsin, found a narrow friendship through wood sports.

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MAAYAN SILVER / WUWM

The level of competition for the rolling of the newspapers of the arrow. This year, Livi Pappadopoulos, 24, from the County of the Crosse, Wisconsin, has become seven times American world champion in the event. Aini Anderson, 16, from the same region, arrived second.

The two say they are “like sisters”. Pappadopoulos has framed Anderson since she was a child, and Anderson says that she was inspired by looking at her teacher to exceed some boys over the years.

“The simple fact of seeing her be able to drop them on them and to compete with them and to humiliate them. It’s like:” I want to do that too one day! “”, Said Anderson.

Pappadopoulos is held on the water. “No matter how many years I have been in competition here, it doesn’t matter how long how much time I get older, something about this standing view here in the bowl makes me a little tearful,” she said.

“This is what our year is centered. You know, there are people waiting for Christmas or certain things throughout the year, but that’s it for us. This is why we work and what we are looking forward to.”

Wuwm Katherine Kokal And Maria Peralta-Alex Report contributed to this story.