When the good weather arrives and the fog leaves the valleys of the Scottish Highlands, the Highlands Games are organized, gatherings where sports such as the hammer throw are practiced – a real, iron hammer, as opposed to sport olympic-, the game of tug-of-war with a bunch of Scots forced into the traditional skirt, the kiltat each end of the rope and a few games where the protagonist is a log, the most famous of which is the caber toss. The name of this sport is an expression in the Gaelic language that derives from kaber, the word to define a wooden shelf. No one knows the exact origin of this sport that represents the identity of these highlands of Scotland where today few people live, as the big cities are in the lowlands. Some places, however, where for centuries have lived tough people with a reputation for being untamed, organized in clans always ready to face the invaders who, punctually, arrived from the south. There are those who say, in fact, that the caber toss born as a military practice, to make logs fly in the direction of the enemies. Academics prefer to think that in its origin there must have been boastful Scots, eager to compete with the logs that they dropped from one side of the rivers as if they were bridges to cross them.
It was during the 19th century that the Scots reclaimed many of the customs that the English had considered barbaric. The portraits of the great heroes, such as William Wallace or Robert the Bruce, were dusted off, Gaelic was tried to be recovered, rules were put in the caber toss and the first tournaments were organized. People, tea or whiskey in hand, gather during the Highlands Games to watch the draftees line up waiting their turn to fly the log, always wearing the traditional kilt, the kilt. A regular spectator of this spectacle has been the British Queen, who admires these sportsmen who now attract thousands of tourists who often believe that the game is about blowing the log as far as possible. It is not true. The trunk, usually of Larix, is given to the participant, who with the palms of his hands raises it in a vertical position. After a short run, he flies it up trying to make it turn 180 degrees. That is, the upper part of the trunk must be the first to touch the ground. If the thrower has enough strength and technique, the log will continue to rotate and the lower part where he caught it will go all the way up, until it falls on the other side. That’s the goal, to turn it around. If the throw isn’t good enough, the bottom doesn’t quite come up, and the log lands near the thrower’s feet, the umpires score the maneuver based on the angle of the log’s rise.
The caber toss it connects Scotland to those years when the heart of the country was in the highlands, where everything was hard and you had to be strong. It is now a tradition that fills the country with pride, although it hurts them that the last three world records have been achieved by Canadians, as this discipline is also practiced in all corners of the planet with a Scottish diaspora, from the United States to Australia
