PETANQUE: Germans show Bay locals a few tricks

ANENDRA SINGH
German Heide Loebers was holidaying in France about 25 years ago with some friends when a group of people chucking metal balls caught her eye.
The action could best be described as awkward but then the French looked so relaxed with the wine flutes in their hands.
It was a bewitched Loebers and her friends' first flirtation with petanque and the beginning of a life-long passion for the game the French also call boules.
Loebers returned to her hometown of Heidelberg, about 90km south of Frankfurt, and with her friends established the Heidelberg Petanque Club with 10 members.
"It's a fascinating game, with a good atmosphere, hard to win and a game men and women can play together," Loebers told SportToday, apologising for not having a full grasp of the English language.
But there was nothing wrong with her grasp of the metal ball during the Hawke's Bay Summer Open Doubles tournament at the Bay View Petanque Club at the weekend. She and clubmate, Christian Gross, clinched the title after defeating the Napier Petanque Club pair of Maurice Belz and Lee Tassard 13-9 in the final.
"The concentration is high and the technique must be good," she explained yesterday after the conclusion of the tournament on Sunday, which attracted a field of 50 pairs from Wellington to Auckland.
The secondary schoolteacher and Gross, 39, a software engineer, arrived in Christchurch from Germany on December 4 and go back home at the end of this month after their New Zealand tour.
Entrenched in their holiday schedule is the goal of playing in every petanque tournament in the country over their three-month stay. They lost in the semifinals of a Kapiti Coast tournament a fortnight ago.
Loebers, who is the president (boule spieler) of her club, played in a Masterton tourney five years ago with another clubmate, Rhinehart Muller, and took back some fond memories.
Gross said 12,500 Germans played the game competitively but there were more than a million social players. He is ranked among the top 30 males nationally while Loebers is among the top 10 in her gender. In 2002 he competed in the North Sea European Championships, finishing third, while she competed in the women's world championship in Canada in the same year as part of a German triples team that bowed out in the quarterfinals.
In the Bay event, the Germans overpowered the Bay View pair of Dawn Gardner, 75, and Dave Bosley, 13-10 in the semifinals.
Organiser Murray Porter said the Bay View club's 13 members have a proud tradition of representing their country, with Gardner playing against Australia in Levin last year in the over-60s grade. He, Geoff Greer and Denise Bavidge represented New Zealand in the world champs in Madagascar in 1999.
Sharon Cannon flew the flag in France last year and Reberta Campbell at the Singapore Open and Australia.
"We are making contact with the Germans and English in a reciprocal arrangement to provide meals and accommodation for players wanting to play here and for us to go to play there," Porter told SportToday.