As I type this, the first round of matches of Euro 2024 are getting underway and by the time you come to read it, you may have only just finished celebrating - or commiserating - the results (delete as appropriate according to performance of England team).
Or, you could, like me, remain largely indifferent to the whole thing, instead seeking out more unconventional sporting contests closer to home than Germany.
There’s certainly plenty to choose from in Derbyshire and the Peak District – we have Bonsall’s World Championship Hen Racing (more or less self-explanatory) as well as the Great Kinder Beer Barrell Challenge, where teams of competitors race to carry a heavy beer barrel over Kinder Scout.
The area close to the Derbyshire/Staffordshire border seems a particular hotbed of unusual sporting challenges.
The New Year’s Day Mappleton Bridge Jump was formerly held literally on the border of the two counties, which I attended in January 2020 shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic (this ultimately proved to be the final time it was staged), and Grindon in the Staffordshire Moorlands has its annual Hedgehog Rolling (animal rights activists rest assured – the ‘hedgehogs’ batted along a course by broomsticks are in fact dried pine cones).
Our area’s most unsavoury ‘sport’ must however surely be the annual World Championship Toe Wrestling Championships.
You might be fooled into thinking this one happens in April, but it’s very much not an April 1st prank and does genuinely occur, the traditional date for the contest usually falling nowadays on a Saturday in August.
The championships were first staged back in 1974 at The Royal Oak inn, Wetton, Staffordshire, meaning that this year’s tournament marks the 50th anniversary of this prestigious contest.
Following a run of poor performances by the UK in the Olympic Games, the concept was devised half a century back by a quartet of Wetton pubgoers (reported in one source to be a group of Manchester University students) as a national sport in which the UK could finally excel (true to form, a mere two years into proceedings, the championships were won by a Canadian).
At some point in the early 21st century the arena for the event migrated from Wetton and crossed the Derbyshire border to the Bentley Brook Inn, located seven miles away at Fenny Bentley - although in 2016 toe wrestling events were held at both Fenny Bentley and the original venue, the Royal Oak.
The Royal Oak again played host from 2017-19 and in February 2020 a change of venue was announced, with the tournament due to take place at Ashbourne Heights, a holiday caravan park at Fenny Bentley.
This did not ultimately happen owing to the pandemic, but a contest was staged here in 2021 with the prize of a break at the venue up for grabs.
In 2022 the venue transferred again, this time to the heart of Ashbourne town centre at the Ex-Servicemen’s Club on the Market Place.
It was only last year, eight years into my ongoing quest to document Derbyshire and Peakland folklore and traditions, that I finally made it to the Toe Wrestling, having been preoccupied with covering the big hitters like Castleton Garland, well dressings and Ashbourne’s very own Shrovetide Football.
I journeyed to Ashbourne working under the assumption that the Toe Wrestling Championships was one of those more obscure and quirky events which were only really known to the locals; however, I had seemingly failed to take into account how quickly in the Internet Age information spreads across the globe.
I met up with my friend and fellow folklorist Matt Kerry beforehand and after a quick browse around Ashbourne Historical Centre inside the Town Hall, where we studied the painted footballs on display from previous generations of Shrovetide games, we enter Ashbourne Ex-Serviceman’s Club on the opposite side of the Market Place armed with our modest recording equipment.
Neither of us were quite prepared for the bustling scene unfolding inside the club.
It instantly becomes apparent that Matt and I aren’t the only ones interested in documenting today’s proceedings.
It’s a good job there weren’t any major news events happening elsewhere in the UK on the afternoon, because half of the world’s media appear to be concentrated in this small room in Derbyshire; inside you can’t move for zoom lenses, trailing cables, boom microphones and selfie sticks.
Once the ‘wrestling’ gets under way, the tiny stage of the club becomes quickly swamped by camera crews, and the organisers have to make repeated pleas to the people wielding the equipment to be mindful that the small handful of non-media people present spectating have a chance of seeing the action.
There’s a crew present from the website joe.co.uk who have sent some of their young reporters along to gamely participate in the event.
Rumours swirl that one of the filmmakers is from Netflix, who have previously featured Gloucestershire’s Cheese Rolling event on a documentary strand about quirky competitions entitled ‘We Are the Champions’, although at the time of writing nothing about Toe Wrestling seems to have cropped up on the streaming platform.
Perhaps most impressive – or baffling – of all is that Canadian content creator ‘Benoftheweek’ (real name Benjamin De Almeida) has travelled over to the UK specially in a journey taking in three flights, two trains and two buses to take part, hoping to replicate the early success of his fellow countryman who claimed the World Championship title two years in.
Ben has 7.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channel and at the time of writing his video ‘I BECAME A TOE WRESTLER’ has had 868,933 views.
It provides an entertaining overview of the day, although with all the gurning, fast-paced editing and whacky sound effects, I did begin to feel like I had been repeatedly bludgeoned about the head by a cartoon mallet by the end of it.
Much like the Euros currently taking place in football, the Toe Wrestling championships unfold across a series of knockout heats to determine the ultimate champion.
Competitors sit on the stage, place their feet into a large Pythonesque foot-shaped board and lock toes.
Retired champion Alan ‘Nasty’ Nash, officiating, prods their toes ritualistically with a long cane with a small plastic foot on the end of it, utters the cry ‘Toes Away!’ and then in a similar fashion to arm wrestling, contestants have to use all their might, grappling to overpower their opponent’s foot.
After taking the champion title 17 times, Alan retired from participating in 2022 at the age of 63. I never got to witness him in his wrestling days so can’t really vouch for what he was like in action; perhaps retirement has mellowed him somewhat, but as officiator in 2023 he seemed a rather affable and welcoming fellow towards anyone considering entering and hence not really living up to his ‘Nasty’ soubriquet…
If you’re sat there reading this thinking that Toe Wrestling sounds totally disgusting and depraved, well, there are some concessions to hygiene.
Before each bout, competitors are required to methodically dunk their feet in bowls of soapy water and towel off – which lends a curiously incongruous air of devout religious proceedings to every build-up to a match, as though they are anointing themselves.
The championships are also administered under a yellow and red card system. Offences that would warrant a red card and therefore instant disqualification include ‘being abusive to any official’ and ‘being found in any way of cheating or fixing a contest’.
As I had clearly totally underestimated, where there is a quirky contest making the English appear characteristically eccentric, camera crews are sure to sniff the event out, and where there are camera crews means there is the opportunity for publicity - something not lost on product manufacturers.
In 1995, Mycil Athlete’s Foot Powder enterprisingly elected to sponsor the event. Slightly more tangentially, in the early 2000s American ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s got wind of the event and leant their sponsorship to it (alongside similarly zany UK competitions like Llanwrtyd Wells’ World Bog Snorkelling Championships and the World Conker Championships held in Northamptonshire).
In 2016, the ownership passed from Ben & Jerry to Ben & Alan, when local Wetton lad Ben Woodroffe (another former toe wrestling champion who has competed since he was aged 14 and recently had his big toenail surgically removed to improve his prowess) and Alan ‘Nasty’ Nash clubbed together to buy the rights to the trademark back off the American purveyors of frozen goods, bringing Toe Wrestling firmly back into the community which first spawned it.
‘Having the championship back in our hands is probably the best thing that’s happened to us,’ Ben told The Guardian in a 2023 interview. ‘We have made it bigger and bigger each year’.
If you’re reading all this feeling like you have latent world championship potential in you, then this year’s golden jubilee contest takes place at the Ashbourne Ex-Serviceman’s Club on Saturday August 31.
Toes away!
