This article – written by Peter Malcouronne and with photographs by Adrian Malloch – first appeared in North & South magazine in April 2007 and is republished here with permission.
Woodchopping used to be must-watch television – like Top Town, Mastermind and It’s In The Bag. But while the sport has lost its profile, it’s never quite gone away. In late summer, Peter Malcouronne went to the small Bay of Plenty town of Katikati to watch a down-on-its-luck New Zealand side take on Australia.
Head past the haunted house and the bouncy castle, past the ride-on lawnmowers and around the racing pigs (reputedly the fastest in all Katikati) and you’ll see them – 10 giants in green tracksuits, driven by drizzle to a bloke’s huddle under a cypress tree. “So this is the New Zealand summer?” says Justin Beckett drolly.
He’s one of the star draws for the Katikati Axemen’s and Community Carnival, held alongside the town’s annual A&P show. An insouciant fellow with thick, greying hair and stunted goatee, Beckett’s a big man. No – he’s a huge man: 6ft 4in (193cm), nearly 22 stone (139kg), with a Minotaur’s shoulders and hands like coal buckets. He’s been cutting for his country for 11 years and now, at 31, is reaching his prime as an axeman. He’s won several world titles, but his finest moment could be just four hours away when he’ll lead Australia against New Zealand in the first of three woodchopping tests.
Hoping to get a decisive edge for his team, Beckett will chop first in the six-event relay. He’ll cut the underhand, standing astride a block and chopping it between his legs, then a team-mate will take over on the standing block, so named because you simply stand beside the block and hack it in half. The sawyers – the single first, then the two-man double – follow, then a second underhand and the final standing block.
All going to plan, Beckett’s contribution will take no more than 30 seconds – the time it takes him to blast through a 325mm diameter block. His team should finish inside three minutes. All going to plan.
But as Beckett stalks the Katikati woodchopping arena, he admits there’s a lot that can go wrong. There’s the wood for a start. The Australians are used to cutting hardwoods – gum, ash, jarrah – but the wood here at Katikati is Lombardy poplar for the warm up events, Monterey pine – pinus radiata – for the tests. Softer wood but not always easier.
“Radiata’s a nice wood to chop if it’s good radiata,” Beckett drawls. “If it’s grown in a plantation quick, then it’s real soft. But old radiata has very little sap – it’s full of cork. I’ve had some shocking experiences with the stuff. You hit it as hard as you like and the axe doesn’t go in. It’s like hitting a lump of dry, old leather. It’s not so bad when you’re cuttin’ for yourself but when you’re cuttin’ for your team, your country – when there’s half a dozen Aussie fellas relyin’ on ya – it’s a real kick in the teeth.”
And so Beckett and his team-mates will check the logs beforehand looking for knots, imperfections and that cursed cork. “This is a sport where so much of it is in your ability to read the wood,” Beckett says. While the blocks may look identical to the layperson, the subtle variations between each may mean you need an extra blow or “hit” to break them. And while he’d back himself with Aussie gum, Beckett’s not so sure about Kiwi pine.
A useful analogy can be made with the different cricket pitches you find either side of the Tasman. A player used to the hard, bouncy tracks of Australia must adapt his game if they are to prosper on New Zealand’s lower, softer wickets. So Beckett and his team mates will do things the New Zealand way: they’ll change the angle they cut from 30 degrees to 45. “You take a narrow chip in with the woods back home,” Beckett explains. “Because the wood’s harder, you’re less ambitious.”
And the Australians will also try the old Kiwi trick of drawing a file along the edge of their axes. They say it helps the head break through the corkier wood. Beckett admits he doesn’t know why.
Despite the wood, despite the fact New Zealand stole a test off them in Sydney last year, Beckett exudes an Australian’s confidence. “We’ve had the wood on the Kiwis over the last few years,” he says with the barest trace of a smile.
While New Zealand, in David Bolstad and Jason Wynyard, have the two best axemen in the world, they’re missing their third-best chopper, Dion Lane, who’s competing in Europe, and the promising underhand cutter Pat Barrett. Worse, their single sawyer Allan Salter died suddenly three weeks ago, forcing the New Zealand selectors to press-gang into service lvor Thomas, a bloke who hasn’t lifted an axe in a year, three years or four, depending on who you talk to.
The word in chopping circles is this is a two-man team backed up by boys. That Australia’s experience – and their strength in depth – will be too great. Beckett, though, is having none of it.
“They’re saying the two underhand cutters aren’t that good, but they bloody well are. Kyle Lemon may be a little fella, but he steps up whenever he puts on the black singlet. And lvor Thomas is probably one of the strongest and most talented axemen around. He’s a big lump of a bloke. Massively strong.”
The heroes at Glen Eden Primary circa 1977 weren’t All Blacks, but a wrestler called King Curtis and Sonny Bolstad, the axeman, who, it was said – and it was such a fabulous story it had to be true – clear felled the Canterbury Plains singlehanded in a weekend. Woodchopping was on the telly every Sunday afternoon and the starter’s stern edict – “Axemen, Stand By Your Logs!” – became a West Auckland playground mantra. A few of us aspired to be ‘jiggerboarders’ — scaling trees with axe and board – but it was the out-and-out power of the standing block that most impressed my six year-old compatriots. And it was here that Sonny Bolstad, a sharp-featured man with a sharper tongue and a dazzling array of towelling “angry” hats, was King.
“Sonny was the finest axeman I’ve seen,” says Dave Hawkins, a ruddy, white-singleted silverback who’s seen a few in his time. “Shit he was good. A master of slope – always bang on 45.”
I’m sitting beside 70-year-old Hawkins as he readies himself for the 350mm standing blocks handicap. Here the starter counts off from one, the axemen joining in as their handicap allows (the top men might start off 30 seconds behind the first competitor). Hawkins is off a four these days but he was a handy axeman in his time, good enough to win North Island and South Island titles (and, possibly, even a New Zealand title, though he says he “can’t remember”).
“At my peak I had a reasonable shot against most people, but I never beat Sonny. He was at Reporoa once with a crook back, and I thought, ‘I’ve got you, ya bastard’. He grimaces, holds his thumb and forefinger a sliver apart. “He beat me by about that much.”
Hawkins spins a good yarn. He tells me about the time Bolstad relieved a big-mouthed Yank of his money after the American boasted he could chainsaw through a log faster than Bolstad and his partner could saw. And he tells me about his working life, starting as a teenage bushman on the West Coast, then up to the Kaingaroa Forest in the Bay of Plenty. “In them days we’d be thinning with our axes. Choppin’ everything down. When I first started, we’d chop down 100 trees a day with the axe. We didn’t get one-man chainsaws until 1956 – it was all cross-cut saw and axe in them days.” Just good, hard yakka. Hawkins retired in 2002 – having spent 50 years and two months working the forest.
He’s part of a brotherhood that goes back 200 years. The first axemen came out of the now-lost cedar stands of coastal New South Wales, the primeval beech forests of the West Coast, the great kauri forests of the upper North Island. They were hard men who liked a drink and a wager: the inaugural woodchopping contest is said to have taken place in 1870 between two toey Tasmanians for a £25 stake (newspapers report it ended in a “free-for-all fight”).
Sonny Bolstad was the finest axeman I’ve seen. Shit he was good. A master of slope – always bang on 45.
By 1900, the first of the great Kiwi cutters had emerged, men like Tom West, Con Casey and Dave ‘Darby’ Pretty perhaps the best of them all. Until the 1960s, old-timers maintained that Pretty was the greatest standing-block cutter the world had ever known. Certainly he wasn’t someone you’d tease about his surname: at 6ft 6in (198cm) and 19 stone (120.6kg), Pretty was positively Brobdingnagian in a time when All Blacks forwards were barely 6ft (183cm) and 14 stone (89kg).
They competed hard, played even harder. In the rollicking Australasian woodchopping tome titled (what else!) Axemen, Stand By Your Logs, writer Richard Beckett delights in the legend of Dinny Hoey. One of the swathe of great Northland Māori axemen dating back to Hōne Heke, Hoey was considered almost invincible on his day – as long as he wasn’t thirsty. Beckett tells the story of how Hoey, peeved at slow service, vowed he could drink the beer faster than the barman could pour it, and promptly sank 15 pints. But this next Hoey story truly illustrates the genius of the man.
When he really wanted to win an event, so the story goes, he’d slip small kids some coin. Beckett: “As the axemen neared the end of their logs the kids would give a terrific cheer, shouting his [Hoey’s] name as the winner. The other axemen would pause and that pause was enough for Dinny to deliver his money-making blows to his own log before his opponents recovered their rhythm.”
When you hear such tales – and more from an old guy like Dave Hawkins – it’s hard not to feel nostalgia for an old New Zealand now lost. This was a simpler time, before deforestation was invented – and when trees were just something that got in the way. A time when working men stuck together. When sons followed their fathers into the forests. When mechanisation was an aid and not a replacement.
However, it’d be a mistake to assume the art of woodchopping is dead. It may no longer be on the telly, but there are 70 active clubs in the country, from Opononi to Invercargill. And the 120 competitors here at Katikati include first-season hackers and world champs, aged 13 to 77. All wearing the woodchoppers’ pressed white trousers – the old values still hold on. Men like Dave Hawkins won’t have it any other way.
And now it’s time for him to chop. He marks his cutting guides with crayon, just as he’s done a thousand times before. He waits for the count and then he’s off. His first few blows open a gash in the log – the old stager’s looking good. And I’m joined ringside by a rangy bloke who clearly knows his stuff.
“He’s got to halfway now so he’s giving the harsh driving blows up. He’s going to jump around now, open the back up and he’s going to cut the back in about 12 hits looking at that.”
Unfortunately for Hawkins, he’s picked a log with an off-centre core and it’ll take him considerably longer. My commentator generously cuts him some slack. “Well if I can still chop a block like that when I’m 70, I’d be a happy man,” says David Bolstad. “Wouldn’t you?”
He looks like his old man. Six foot five inches (1.96m) tall, broad, craggy, he also has the unmistakable snoz. As he’s heard innumerable times since he first chopped aged five, David Bolstad’s a chip off the old block.
But the younger Bolstad, now 37, insists they’re very different. “You’d see the difference in our chopping styles the moment you saw us,” he tells me. “He was more roundhouse than me – he had a lot more swing to his hit – whereas I’m more direct and don’t swing at anything I don’t have to. I tend to think about every hit I put into the wood.”
And the quietly-spoken son with the soulful eyes is also poles apart in temperament from his inflammable father. “He was highly strung, all right,” says Bolstad. “He used to get pretty worked up. If someone was doing something they shouldn’t, or if someone was cheatin’, he’d be f***in’ chewing make no mistake about it. He was a man of few words… but we had a tremendous bond. We lived together… played together.”
Worked together too. Bolstad the younger left school at 14 and went straight into the forest. He was there in 1987 when a logging machine collapsed, killing his father. Sonny Bolstad was 51.
The day before he died, the older Bolstad won his umpteenth New Zealand standing-block title, but for the previous couple of years he’d had to defer to his 17-year-old son in the underhand. Even those who’d been well “chewed” thought it fitting when, just a few days after Bolstad’s death, his boy debuted for New Zealand in a team that toured Tasmania.
The perils of being the “son of” a legend are well documented but David Bolstad’s achievements quite possibly outstrip those of his father. He holds 30 national records (remarkably, Sonny still holds 25). In 2001, 2003 and 2004 Bolstad won the Stihl Timbersports, the lucrative American lumberjack series featuring the world’s premier choppers. And while chopping seems to have more world titles these days than boxing, David Bolstad’s 60 titles easily surpass his father’s 20.
The Taumarunui slugger’s main rival as New Zealand’s finest all time axeman may not in fact be his father but the immensely powerful man who’s just opened his aluminium axe-box in front of us. With the test just an hour away, Jason Wynyard wants to get in a couple of warm-up chops. Six-four (1.93m) and 22 stone (139kg), Wynyard looks like an outsized Troy Flavell, but he’s your archetypal gentle giant.
Swinging out of the West Auckland suburb of Massey, the 32-year-old has spent much of the past decade competing in the US. Seven times since 1997 he’s won a Dodge pick-up truck for winning the Stihl Timbersports title; eight years straight from 1999 he won the Lumberjack World Championship. He’s huge in the States: over there you can buy Jason Wynyard bobblehead dolls.
Like Bolstad, woodchopping’s in his blood. His grandfather chopped; father, Pae, chopped alongside Sonny Bolstad for New Zealand. With wife Karmyn (the 6ft 3in sister of Dion Lane), he’s won New Zealand and world titles in the Jack’n’Jill (man and woman) double saw. Their two sons, Tai, nine, and Tautoko, two, evidently show promise: a Stihl press release issued after Tautoko’s birth breathlessly listed his weight – “an astonishing 10 lbs, 11 ozs” (4819 grams).
If you’re ever in the mood for a long and inconclusive discussion, ask a woodchopping aficionado who’s better – Wynyard or the Bolstads. After 10 minutes of hedging, one chopper opted for the fence: “Jason’s got immense power,” he told me. “He could drive off more than David. But David’s more of a technician. He’s an artist with the axe.”
However, it looks as though I’ll get to decide for myself – Bolstad is about to go mano-a-mano with Wynyard in the 325mm underhand handicap. He rummages through his box and picks his axe: he has 50 in his stable, most mirror-like, high-carbon steel Tuatahi numbers. (Masterton’s Tuatahi axemakers are considered the world’s best; they make 800 axes [at $400-plus each] and 140 saws [$5000] a year, exporting 90 per cent).
Meanwhile, Wynyard has his tape out and measures up his log. It seems awfully complicated, and David Karam, cousin of All Black Joe and a decent journeyman chopper, explains: “The measurements are very precise. If the wood’s 325mm thick, then you draw your scarves (cuts) 325 apart as well. But you’ll find the scarves are slightly offset on either side – they won’t marry up evenly. That’s to help that last bottom blow to drive through.”
Sensing my confusion, he makes a Leonardo da Vinci sketch. The key point, I think, is to cut the two sides on different lines so that when it comes to the final blow, the driving blow, there’ll be space in behind which’ll help the log to break.
If this seems hard to follow, then you get a far better idea when you’re just a few metres from the men. While Wynyard sets off in a seeming fury, his axe a blur, you realise he’s following his guide lines very precisely. Cut too narrow and you’re hitting the wood square on; go out too far and you wind up cutting too much.
Watching Wynyard cut, his trademark “Shew, Shew, Shew” with every blow hewn, is mesmerising and so it’s a surprise that Bolstad’s log falls a hit earlier.
Afterwards small circles of men, hands in pockets, form around the broken logs. The study of the logs is a peculiar woodchopping ritual – but these men like to count the individual hits, check out the angles, the depth of each cut.
The cluster around the Bolstad log don’t say much. There’s little to be said. “That’s beautiful,” muses Karam. “Just textbook stuff.”
It’s 11am, just an hour out from the test, and event organiser Val Baker is fighting a war on several fronts. The morning’s programme is running late, a German TV crew partial to close-ups seem in dire danger of decapitation and Baker’s twin 13-year-old daughters, Florrie and Ali, who were due to compete five minutes ago, were last seen off at the hot chips stall.
An indomitable 48-year-old who manages a dairy farm, firewood company and timber-processing yard, Baker is also secretary of the New Zealand Axemen’s Association. “My grandfather, Walter Baker, was a champion,” she says. “Won several New Zealand titles. He managed the team that beat the Aussies in ‘68. I’m fourth generation timber. Timber’s in me blood.”
And a certain stridence too. Baker stomps off across the arena, has a quick word in the ear of the ground announcer and then a faintly familiar voice enquires as to the twins’ whereabouts. It’s Cliff Hughes, the smooth-talking septuagenarian who used to run the Auckland Easter Show and was also South Pacific Television’s woodchopping man.
In the early ‘80s, Hughes won world titles in the saw; in 2004 and ‘05 he won the Masters underhand at the Lumberjack World Champs. Twice a week he coaches the 14-strong Mount Maunganui College team, the only school side in the country, of which the recalcitrant twins are its youngest members.
“I’ve instilled in them… I’ve tried to instil in them that double sawing is a team game – there’s no way on your own. You’ve got to work with your partner; if you fight each other you’ve got no show. One complementing the other – that’s the story.”
Initially, he says one of the twins was dominant. “Florrie would get upset and start crying and I couldn’t hack that as a coach. I said, ‘You come here to train, not bloody cry’, but now Florrie’s taken the initiative.”
Nevertheless, it’s Ali who answers all the questions when the slight, long-haired twins return. “We’ve sussed the teamwork out,” she asserts. “In practice, we can get quite mad. We slightly fight with one another – ‘You’re putting too much weight on; you’re not keeping it level’. Cliff tells us off. We get over it.”
When they’re put up against two much bigger 16-year-old girls, their synergy compensates for their lack of size. “Stroke the wood, stroke the wood,” urges Hughes. “Beautiful.”
They lose narrowly but Hughes is happy. “They sawed well. They stroked the full length of the saw; they didn’t overweight. And they sawed level – they didn’t bend or hook up, which makes it harder to pull.”
And Val Baker is also well pleased. “I’m a very proud Mum,” she says. “They carry the flag in the Baker family. Their first attempt to saw was only last year at Katikati when Ali was roped in to a Jack’n’Jill and was just 1/100th of a second off winning money.
“Afterwards, someone told me, ‘There was a lot of Wally in that girl’s face’.”
Since mid-morning there’s been a gradual change in the mood in the ring. The camaraderie so evident between the Trans-Tasman choppers has faded: the blokes who an hour ago were lugging logs for one another, even sharing axes, now pass without a word. The test match between Australia and New Zealand starts in 20 minutes.
It’s a battle that’s raged, on and off, for nearly half a century. From 1960 and for most of the next two decades New Zealand flew a team to Sydney, winning as many matches as they lost. But as the sport’s television coverage dried up, the Trans-Tasman contests petered out
Over the past 10 years there’s been a revival of sorts, though with a conspicuous lack of success for the black-singleted men. However, the fact New Zealand pinched a test last year – in Sydney, and with “their damned wood” – had led to hopeful thoughts in the Kiwi camp that this might just be their year.
That was before the team lost half its troops: Dion Lane away in Europe; Patrick Barrett and the Trows from Ngatea unavailable; then, the night before the New Zealand trials on January 13, came the awful news that Allan Salter had died of a heart attack. The 51-year-old sawyer had been in the form of his life. Just a few months earlier he’d set a New Zealand single-saw record, slicing through a 375mm-thick log of pine in 11.21 seconds.
With Lane overseas, the only New Zealander to come close to Salter was Jason Wynyard. While he seemed a sound choice – he won the single-sawing world championship in Sydney in 2006 – his appearance as a sawyer would also rob the team of one of their most potent axemen. With New Zealand likely to start off with two young striplings, it looked as though Bolstad would be battling the four Australian axemen largely on his own.
But curious things can happen in woodchopping land. The Saturday night after the first day of trials in Rotorua, Wynyard popped by the house of a retired axeman, a slab of Tui under his arm. He told lvor Thomas the sad news about Salter, news barely a day old, and the two men found themselves reminiscing about a legendary trip they’d all made to the US in 2000. Talk turned to the upcoming test against Australia and then, after a few beers, Wynyard made his pitch: “We need you, lvor.”
“Ivor’s got a skill that’s pretty rare. He’s a natural, but he’s also been taught really well by David Bolstad. He’s applied his natural skills to that good technique and it’s a deadly combination. Because he’s immensely strong. And he’s very quick for a bigger man.”
Considered one of New Zealand’s most gifted axemen, Thomas was just 17 when he went on that US trip. He celebrated his 18th birthday in the States, then the very next day won the world underhand championship. Scroll through the New Zealand records and you’ll see his name alongside the blue-riband pinus radiata 325mm underhand block – ahead of even Wynyard and Bolstad. “He’s got a skill that’s pretty rare,” says Wynyard. “He’s a natural, but he’s also been taught really well by David Bolstad. He’s applied his natural skills to that good technique and it’s a deadly combination. Because he’s immensely strong. And he’s very quick for a bigger man. There’s not many people in the world who’d beat him.”
But Thomas gave it away at 21. Wynyard thinks he fell out with a few people in the game and “got a bit discouraged”. Others less generous reckon he was just lazy. Thomas’s explanation is simple: “I chopped most of my teenage years and never had much of a life. So I was just partying it up for a few years.”
Now, at 24, and carrying perhaps 150 kgs on his sub-six-foot frame, Thomas was going to dust off his axe. But the New Zealand Axemen’s Association Rule 6:2 states explicitly that “No entries can be taken on the day”, so a flurry of late-night phone calls ensued. “I got the call from Jason,” Val Baker recalls, and he said, ‘I don’t want to lose to Australia again, Val – we need Ivor’.” The next day, using an axe he borrowed from Bolstad, Thomas finished second and found himself back on the team.
But a fortnight into Thomas’s comeback, there’s still doubt about his fitness. Throughout this morning, the nine-man New Zealand team keep returning to their informal camp under the trees, trying to settle on a line-up that will see two of them left out. With the test now just 15 minutes away, the decision is made – Kyle Lemon will stand down and Thomas will cut the second underhand log.
And so woodchopping’s prodigal son preps his log, measures and marks it, then deftly chips out footholds at each end. Without any fuss, and in just a few minutes, the crowd has gone from 200 to 500 to 1500, maybe more. Sitting, standing, even clambering up oak trees, they look on in near silence as the men ready themselves.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” interrupts the voice of Cliff Hughes, the old showman, “can I ask you to stand for the national anthems to be sung by Katikati’s own George Gates. . . who recently finished 16th in New Zealand Idol.”
He sings well, does George, wisely eschewing the wavering vibrato of your standard Idol, though it’s the Australian manager, Harold Winkel, who sings loudest. (Told by a doctor to give up chopping, the 61-year-old said, “I’d rather die in the ring. If I pass out, just wave a stubbie under my nose and I’ll be fine.”)
The starter makes his call: “Axemen. Stand by your blocks. One. Two…”
Thwack!
The Australian captain’s axe slams into the log under his feet. Justin Beckett, a mountain of a man, dwarfs New Zealand’s Steven Knowles, but it’s the younger man who’s swinging faster. Still, it’s the Australian who turns first to attack his 325mm log from the other side. Sensing he’s behind, Knowles tries to hit harder, swinging higher, but loses his rhythm and his axe appears to catch. When Beckett punches through his log, the young Kiwi is still nine hits off breaking his.
Hughes, who’s meant to be calling the race, sighs again. If you go nine down in a test where there’s rarely more than a hit or two between each event, there’s usually no coming back. Already, just 30 seconds in, the test seems as good as lost. Only lvor Thomas retains some optimism. “Still early days,” he mutters.
For the first half of his standing log, New Zealand’s other neophyte, Shane Jordan, 20, gives the chop of his life. Up against the formidable Danny Staib, arguably Australia’s best axeman, the lean Jordan matches him hit for hit. But adrenaline and inexperience can get the better of any man: Jordan, thinking his log’s about to break, tries to drive it off with a roundhouse overhand swing but the log’s not ready. He tries again, then again – and he’s conceded another four hits to the Australians.
Thirteen hits down after just two events. “An insurmountable deficit,” Hughes would later comment.
Jason Wynyard, on the single saw, had his back to Jordan but sensed from the crowd that things weren’t going well. With eyes fixed on the hand of his wedger Terry Wilkins (which rests on his saw) he waits, then rips the saw towards him when Wilkins’ hand lifts. He’s miles behind but can’t afford to think about that, nor about how good his opponent Kerry Head is. He just needs to concentrate on his own game. For some reason his saw’s hard to pull and so he decides to saw “short” – perhaps 20cm less than its length. It’s safer that way – less likely to jam. Just got to keep things straight and sure. Maintain rhythm. It takes him less than 11 seconds to saw through the log.
Remarkably Wynyard’s picked up a couple of hits and the first tentative, almost diffident, calls of “Kee-Wee, Kee-Wee” are heard. And then something goes awry for the Australian double. Using a peg-and-raker saw instead of the M-tooth configuration they use back home, they’ve “hooked a raker” – the saw snagging on the wood and stopping dead. In the half-second it takes them to straighten and reset, New Zealand’s double sawyers, Pouri Rakete-Stones and Aiden Strother, pick up another couple of hits.
Nine hits down. Now it’s Ivor Thomas’s turn.
He’s up against the 6ft 6in (1.98m) Laurence O’Toole Jnr – the latest O’Toole to cut for Australia from a line stretching back, almost unbroken, over 60 years and three generations. He’s a hell of an underhand cutter: his arms, reputedly longer than any man in woodchopping, seem to come out of the heavens when he brings his axe down. And he’s halfway through the front end of his log before Thomas even starts.
Thomas has come from behind before, but never from this far back. Surely. With little form and less fitness behind him, he’s going to have to chop better than he ever has. He’s too far back to do anything stupid, too far back to even panic. “Just cut safe,” he tells himself. “Don’t muck up.”
“Kee-Wee. Kee-Wee!” The murmur becomes a clamour as the crowd sense something’s not quite right on the far side of the arena. O’Toole slows – seems to be tiring. Captain Beckett, who’s followed his team down the line, man by man, curses their luck. O’Toole’s struck a corky log and his axe is struggling to penetrate: “It’s like a bloody sponge,” growls Beckett. “The axe just won’t go in.”
The crowd, just metres from Thomas, are starting to lose it. Their delirium has spread to the New Zealand team who, just a few moments earlier, were heard issuing sober tactical tips to their mates. Now it’s as basic as it gets: “Go lvor! Go lvor! C’mon! C’mon lvor. C’mon mate. Bring it in. C’mon!”
But Thomas is listening to just one man, his main man, who’s so close he looks in mortal danger. “Reach lvor,” cries Terry “Mook” Hohneck, urging his tiring friend to bend his knees as he swings and aim for the base of the log. “Reach lvor. Reeeeach!”
BANG. David Bolstad’s axe thuds into his log the very moment Australia’s last man, Dale Ryan, hits his.
For a chopper noted for his precise technique, Bolstad’s first few swings look like thunderous throwbacks to his old man. That opening blow, a ferocious uppercut to the log, had a wind-up that seemed to reach all the way back to Taumarunui. But he’s in perfect control. Unlike Ryan, whose face betrays his desperate excitement, the Bolstad mask gives nothing away.
“C’mon Davey. C’mon Davey.”
His second hit is also an upward blow, and then he hits down, down again.
“KI-WI. KI-WI. KI-WI.”
“C’mon Davey!” Cliff Hughes on the mike’s gone mad but you can’t hear him anyway. “C’mon Davey.” Lumps of wood fly from Bolstad’s log. Looks like he’s three, two hits away. The New Zealand team, who’d been leaping around like loons just a moment ago, have knelt down behind Bolstad, their mouths wordlessly open, seeming to pray for the log to break.
Ryan’s log fractures. One more hit and he’s through. But as he swings down for the coup de grâce, Bolstad’s axe hits first – and his log lazily somersaults through the air.
Fifteen minutes after Bolstad’s half-hit win, the crowd has thinned and the speeches done – Harold Winkel offering a poignant tribute to the late Allan Salter. Local mayor Graham Weld drapes the New Zealand team with their victors’ sashes, Val Adams hands them their prizemoney – $85 each – in little brown envelopes, and your reporter is still shaking.
Bolstad gathers his men in one more time. “You know what this was? Just a bunch of fellas – a bloody good bunch – tryin’ their guts out. It’s gotta be meaningful. And this is f***ing meaningful.”
lvor Thomas repairs to his own camp under the trees where his “Mum, Missus and rellies” have already begun to embellish the story. Wynyard pops across to congratulate the man of the hour. “It’s really awesome to have Ivor back on the team,” Wynyard tells me. “You saw how much time he pegged back in that team race. And it’s not as if he was cutting against no one either. He was cutting against Laurence O’Toole, who’s won world titles. And he had a heck of a big start on him. If you really need someone to pull something out of the box for New Zealand, lvor’s the man.”
You know what this was? Just a bunch of fellas – a bloody good bunch – tryin’ their guts out. It’s gotta be meaningful. And this is f***ing meaningful.
Just 10 metres away from the Thomas whānau, O’Toole, Ryan and Winkel study the log that turned the test. O’Toole, hands in pockets, slowly shakes his head. Ryan runs his fingers over its jagged edge – “It was a f***in’ bastard alright” – but his words are of scant consolation for O’Toole, who stands head bowed, hands buried in pockets, thinking what might have been.
Meanwhile, Bolstad quietly packs his axes away into an aluminium crate and breaks into a smile when I ask him how he handled the pressure of that final log.
“I guess a lot of people falter when they’re in that position,” he says, “but I tell you what – it’s the furthest thing from my mind. Because I… I just love it. It’s like you’re Muhammed Ali looking across at George Foreman and saying, ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life. This is my chance of taking the big, bad, ugly monster that no one can beat.’
“It doesn’t happen very often but I look for those moments. That’s why I chop.”
In memory of David Kelvin Bolstad 12 May, 1969 – 19 November, 2011 and Jason Wynyard 14 November, 1973 – 4 October, 2023. From 1997 to 2017, Wynyard and Bolstad won 19 of the 21 Stihl Timbersport Series titles between them.