Elite competitors from across the country will descend on Lake Hāwea on Saturday for the inaugural Aotearoa Stone Skimming Championships in support of Melanoma NZ.
The event, taking place on a private beach at Lake Hāwea station, is arguably the most important sporting event in the history of the township, which the Wānaka Sun understands has never hosted a national championships in any sport.
The founder of the championships, Lake Hāwea Station’s experience and education manager Richie Laming, said he believed that stone skimming was deeply ingrained in the national psyche, and that he had astronomical hopes for the competition.
"I see this event potentially being the most talked-about sporting event in New Zealand this year," Mr Laming said.
The event would take place in accordance with the rules of the world stone skimming championships, which bear resemblance to Olympic throwing sports like discus or shot-put.
Competitors skim stones from a launchpad on the lake’s shore, and stones are required to skim at least twice while remaining within a 10m-wide channel.
If a thrower left the launchpad, if their stone did not skim twice or if it left the channel, their throw would not count.
Competitors would each have three attempts, the longest skim in each of the male and female categories being the winner.
Stones had to be collected during a registration period on the morning of the competition and fit within a "three-inch ring of truth", Mr Laming said.
As it was the first national championships in New Zealand’s history, the competitive background of the field was something of a hinterland.
He had asked competitors to appraise their stone skimming ability when signing up for the competition, and some competitors’ estimates of their range reached upwards of 100m, Mr Laming said.
In the 28 editions of the world stone skimming championships, the furthest ever skimmed stone had reached 107m, and spectators would be eagerly anticipating a record-setting skim.
The stakes were high, the victors of the male and female categories winning an expenses-paid trip to compete at the world championships in Scotland in September.
However, as the stakes rose, so did the temptation to bend or break the rules — the birth of the New Zealand national championships was a ray of light during a dark period in stone skimming’s history, he said.
In September last year, the stone skimming world championships in Scotland joined Lance Armstrong and the 2014 Russian Winter Olympics team in sporting infamy when it was rocked by a cheating scandal.
The BBC reported that competitors had doctored their stones for optimal skimming performance.
Mr Laming said stone-detection technology would be in place at the competition’s entry point, but that deeply ingrained flaws in human nature and a lack of drug testing meant that the competition was left to rely on the good nature of skimmers.
"If you think about the human population, there’s so much variation in our personalities and our approaches to what you might consider clean sport.
"I got asked the question yesterday, ‘what about performance enhancing drugs?’ and it’s something I’ll need to have a chat to the Sporting Integrity Commission about.
"It’s something we can’t account for completely now, but this is a sport we want to take to the Olympics, so all I can say is that testing athletes in an Olympic-style framework isn’t off the table," Mr Laming said.
The investigative grilling over the competition’s integrity complete, the interview turned to the charitable fundraising at the heart of it all.
The national championships were being held to raise money for Melanoma NZ, and he was confident that fundraising would surpass the $30,000 goal by the end of the weekend, Mr Laming said.
"Unfortunately, we have one of the leading diagnosis rates of melanoma of any country in the world, with 8000 diagnosed per year.
"Beyond that, we actually have the highest death rate, with over 300 people dying from melanoma per year," he said.
"So for us here at Aotearoa stone skimming, teaming up with melanoma was about bringing this incredible foundation into the limelight."
