The New Extreme Sport

The old is new again

Jousting is back in a big way

Sometimes one might encounter a simulation of jousting at a Renaissance fair, but this medieval sport is now returning as a full-contact martial art. There are about 200 jousters around the world and 30 in North America, and as Dashka Slater writes in The New York Times, the sport is becoming increasingly authentic and dangerous:

Over time, modern jousters have learned the lessons of their medieval predecessors — plate armor protects better than chain mail, and more armor protects better than less. Even so, there are still plenty of injuries: concussions and dislocated shoulders, broken hands, assorted fractures and gashes. In one much-talked-about incident a few years ago, the Australian jouster Rod Walker suffered a partly severed penis when a lance veered south during a match at a Renaissance fair in Michigan — a targeting failure that might not have happened if both he and his opponent hadn’t been competing with broken hands.

 

The New York Times Magazine visits the Gulf Coast International Jousting Championiships, a new old extreme sport spun-out of Ren Faires. "This is the real deal,” (said one attendee,) a Renaissance-fair regular named Renzy Hill. “There’s a real possibility of getting hurt.”

From the NYT:

The championship event was created by two men, both professional jousters, who are on a mission to transform jousting from Renaissance-fair entertainment to arena sport. One is Shane Adams, the knight who unhorsed Tolle. The other is Charlie Andrews, a Hummer-driving former bull rider who spent six years as a Navy Seal and is hard-pressed to utter a sentence that doesn’t include at least one profanity. “I personally believe that Shane Adams and myself are the two best jousters in the world, period,” he says. “Anybody wants to argue it, you can come out and joust us or shut your pie hole.” A member of the Chukchansi tribe in California, Andrews is 6-foot-4 and about 250 pounds, with tattoos of his spirit animals ringing his thick biceps. He doesn’t joust because he’s attracted to romantic notions of honor and chivalry or because he has an affinity for the medieval period. (“I don’t know jack about history, nor do I care,” he says.) He does it because he considers jousting one of the most extreme sports ever invented, and he likes doing things that most other people can’t or won’t do.
“I like violent sports,” says Andrews, who also participates in mixed martial arts. “I like hitting you. I like getting hit. I like competing man to man to see who the better man is that day.”

 Jousting the Next Extreme Sport