Shin-kicking, Cotswold Olimpick Games
A four-hundred-year-old event on a hillside above Chipping Campden, judged by an official called the stickler, in which two people hold each other upright and kick.
Robert Dover’s Cotswold Olimpick Games have been held on Dover’s Hill on the Friday after the spring bank holiday, on and off, since 1612. There is a tug-of-war and a hot air balloon and a torchlit procession down into Chipping Campden afterwards, and there is shin-kicking, which is the reason anybody comes.
The rules are these. You wear a white smock. You take hold of your opponent by the shoulders, and you do not let go. You kick their shins until one of you goes down, and going down is a fall, and three falls decides it. Soft shoes only, and only since fairly recently — for most of its history men hardened their shins by hitting them with hammers and wore boots with iron in the toes.
The judge is called the stickler. This is not a nickname. It is the office, it predates the modern sense of the word, and the modern sense of the word comes from it.
The straw
There are bales at the edge of the ring and you help yourself. You stuff it down the front of your trousers and it goes everywhere, and by the second bout most of yours is on the grass and most of what is left has migrated somewhere useless.
I used a great deal. My opponent in the second round used almost none, which I read as confidence, and which was correct.
I took one fall off him and lost the next two inside a minute. The thing nobody tells you is that every instinct you have says lean away, and leaning away is how you get kicked properly. You have to lean in, into the person who is kicking you, and the two people who beat me that day both leant in.
My shins were black into July. I have thought a lot about the straw since, and I have concluded that it does nothing at all. It is not protection. It is a gesture. It is there so that both of you can agree, out loud, in front of witnesses, that something has been done about the shins.