Or playing with their toy cars. 
That was a weird scene.
Yeah if you see a really short guy with furry feet, it’s a safe bet.
That’s racist.
I play 2024, so that’s speciest. 
Even worse! (also we are talking Hobbits, not Halflings and the Professor explicitly states that Hobbits are branch of the race of Men, so racist it is.)
Damn, I remember when this was the New Big Thing. Like Taylor Swift Big. It was everywhere! Now its Pickleball.
Crazy.
Perhaps four decades ago, jai alai was being promoted in Connecticut (and some other states), I think primarily because people could bet on it. I think there were three or four frontons (the name for the arenas in which it was played) in the state.
Here we had “Candlepins for Cash” hosted by Bob Gamere.
I saw a few games of Pato when in Argentina.
It’s pretty impressive , played on horse back, not ponies like in Polo and those things are huge and when they clatter by with only a rope between the spectators and being mashed like a potato , well you don’t want to be leaning back into the field to get a selfie.
I do t recall anyone getting pulled off their horse , but if they did , you wouldn’t have to bury them .
Is that like the curling that was shown in the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service movie? It resembled the curling I know here in Canada, except it wasn’t. But the girls in the movie enjoyed it, and the idea still seemed to be to get a stone closest to centre.
Would Scottish caber-tossing count here, or is it too niche?
I don’t recall the movie, never mind the scene, but it is a lot like curling, except the things they throw look like this:
and they throw them standing, not on their knees. And there is no sweeping. It is a purely individual sport, more like bowling. I guess it is possible there are teams that count the points together against a rival team, but throwing the thing is on the thrower. No help.
I found a 6 minute video explaining the rules in German. I’ll watch it later, probably. Perhaps.
I don’t know the sport well, but I am I right in thinking it’s a bit like Boules on ice?
Compare caber-tossing’s cultural profile in Scotland to that of the one-mile run in the US & UK, which is the event that inspired this thread (the thread we’re reading here, not the one linked). If a new caber-tossing record is set, is it national news in Scotland?
Yes, Boules seems a better analogy than the bowling I mentioned before.
From a quick Google, it doesn’t look like it’s the sort of sport that would have records, per se. It’s based on accuracy, not distance, and it looks like a perfect score is something that’s achievable on any given toss. I don’t know how many tosses each athlete makes in a typical event, so there might still be records for best out of ten, or most perfects in a row, or the like, but there’s no such thing as a record toss.
You correct according to my very old recollection. I used to go to the Highland Games in Los Angeles when I was a kid in the 70s. Cabers, which looked like telephone poles and may have been repurposed telephone poles, weren’t even standard sized.
There was another event where they threw hay bales over an increasingly high crossbar (similar to a pole vault set up) with a pitch fork.
Nope. I couldn’t tell you anything about the current practice of caber-tossing, like who tosses a good caber, or what this season’s high score is etc.
Mind you, shinty isn’t national news, it’s largely restricted to the Highlands and Islands but there’s enough levels and competition that it counts for our purposes.
Yeah, this kind of thing has a pretty wide gray area. But it’s still fun to learn about it all.
…
I’m assuming that among Scotland’s sports fans and in the Scottish sports media (both traditional and online), association football has the largest profile. I’ll assume also that nothing else quite rivals football … but what else is in the Scottish Top-5 for home-grown sports fans?
EDIT: I have a notion – no idea where it came from – that cricket is far less popular in Scotland than in England (unsure about Wales). Perhaps to the point where cricket is largely in the “no one cares” bucket in Scotland. Is that accurate, or not really?
Football is not just the largest as you say but utterly dominant. Behind that, for spectator sports, I would hazard a guess at rugby (esp. internationals), golf, tennis (less so now Andy Murray doesn’t play). Big difference with England would be cricket is very much a minority interest.
Just seen your edit! Yeah, I’m a cricket fan/low-level player and while there are enough clubs to make decent regional leagues, it’s just not in the national psyche.
I think in ESPN’s early days - when they’d broadcast ANY sport that hadn’t already been locked up by the major networks - I saw this. It made me realize that people will make a competition out of anything! It was pretty damn impressive.