Bog Snorkelling: Wales's Great Peat-Trench World Championship

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Every August Bank Holiday, grown adults in wetsuits and flippers lower themselves face-first into a trench of cold peat water in mid-Wales and thrash 120 yards through the dark. This is the World Bog Snorkelling Championship, and it is exactly as absurd, as cold, and as gloriously pointless as it sounds.

The venue is Waen Rhydd, a boggy patch near Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys — a place that bills itself as the smallest town in Britain and behaves like the eccentric uncle of the whole country. The organisers cut a trench roughly 60 yards long straight through the peat, fill it with the sort of brown, tannin-stained water that gives Welsh bogs their smell, and invite anybody daft enough to swim two lengths of it against the clock. First championship: 1985. It has run in August almost every year since, pausing only when the whole world paused in 2020 and 2021.

Mobile Phone Throwing: Finland's Sport of Hurling Your Nokia

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In the year 2000, in the Finnish lake town of Savonlinna, somebody decided the most satisfying thing you could do with an obsolete mobile phone was to throw it as far as humanly possible. They were, of course, completely correct. Thus was born the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship, and Finland added another entry to its remarkable catalogue of taking a joke entirely seriously.

The origin story is almost too good. The event was launched by a Savonlinna translation and interpretation company, whose multinational staff apparently had a lot of frustration and a lot of dead handsets to work through. The two problems solved each other. You take yesterday’s technology, you wind up, you hurl it across a field, and the local recycling centre collects the wreckage afterwards. Catharsis and waste management in one clean motion. It has run in Savonlinna most years since, usually in late summer.

World Championships on vo.rs

Bog Snorkelling: Wales's Great Peat-Trench World Championship

Mobile Phone Throwing: Finland's Sport of Hurling Your Nokia