Shields, steel and saddles: The modern sport of jousting explained.

 On 7 and 8 July, at the Abbey Medieval Festival, Caboolture will host an international tournament for one of most interesting of modern sports – jousting.

You may think jousting was a historic chivalric pursuit, but it thrives today as a modern contact sport.  

Picture this: hundreds of kilos of humans, horses and armour charging at each other, intent on landing the point of their 3 metre lance on the body of their opponent.

There will be wood flying, dents in armour, and if the crowd gets what they want, someone will be knocked off their horse.

No wonder it is popular.  In fact, so popular there is now an International Jousting League, with rankings, and there are annual prestigious jousting events that attract the best from around the world.

Sounds modern?  It’s the way the sport was organised in the 13^th century.  In medieval times, the best knights would travel from tournament to tournament, and were the “sports celebrities” of their day. 

Like all the best sports, the rules of jousting are simple and straightforward, but they allow a great deal of subtlety and gamesmanship from the competitors.

The object of jousting is for a knight to land their lance tip on their opponent - that scores points.   A hit is called an “ataint” and an ataint scores if it is a hit on the shield, body or helmet.  But you get even more points if you shatter your lance upon your opponent.  Yes, wince as you picture that.

The lances are designed to shatter on impact, and the tips are replaced after each ataint.  The breaking point is a set distance from the tip, and a lance must break at that point if it the ataint is to count.

And what does the  jousting “stadium” look like?  Like all sports, there are tiers of seatings all around, so the spectators can see every hit, hear every grunt, and all of the action.  Some things are eternal – it was the same for the gladiatorial games in Rome.

Like most equestrian sports, spectators are more worried about the horses than the humans. Fear not, the horses are safe.  Safer than the jousters. 

There have always been great protections built into jousting to protect the horses.  Harming or targeting  the horses is dreadfully taboo.  If a horse is hit, the offending knight loses the tournament and traditionally had to surrender his own horse.

In fact, we think the horses rather enjoy the action and attention.  Like the jousting knights, they don’t hold back.  And that is how all elite modern sports should be .

As a modern sport, jousting  may even be better than many of the ball-chasing events you see on pay TV.  

It is a brief, intense one-on-one  contest where you can’t miss the action.  All the drama is distilled down to a single moment, the moment of impact.   There is noise, there is shiny armour, there are the “oohs” and “aahs” from the crowd.

And sometimes, we see a knight knocked off his horse.

So take your kids to see an international sporting event in July. An event  with no drunken spectators, one where you get to see a result, and one where everyone learns something about the past.  Go to the jousting.

(Click here to read about the jousting at the Abbey Medieval Festival)