EGGED on by his mates; Stacey Bell’s dramatic finale in the egg toss. PHOTO SUPPLIED
Marokopa’s popular Coast Sports Day returned this month for its 103rd year … give or take.
Last Saturday, competitors enjoyed athletics, equestrian events and wood chopping plus novelty challenges like the sack race, three-legged race and an egg toss.
A pioneer relay involved a horse rider, a runner and a wood chopper working together.
Contestants could also guess the height of a bamboo pole, hit a golf ball into a drum, or take part in a nail driving event: hitting a nail into a block of wood with a hammer with as few swings as possible.
“There was a queue of people waiting to take their turn,” committee member Marcus Paterson said.
Only four or five could do it in one hit; the lucky few then competed in a “nail-off” to determine the male, female and youth winners.
Even local dogs had their own event: a timed swim back to their owners.
“It really drags the crowd from the main ground to the river,” Marcus said.
“The dogs are taken across by barge. And then the owners come back and call the dogs back across the river.
“It’s just all different breeds and away they go. Some of them swim downstream, some upstream and some across. But it’s quite hilarious.”
Coast Sports is an important way people in the district can connect with each other, he said.
“It is absolutely fantastic, and it brings the community together. And that’s for all ages. From young children through to grandparents. And to me, that’s a real joy of the day,” Marcus said.
He also noted that he saw no children using cellphones, all day.
Coast Sports it is one of the community’s oldest annual events, with breaks happening only for World War I and Covid.
An ancestor to the current Coast Sports was the Kinohaku axemen’s carnival which ran from 1906 at Lemon Point. That event was interrupted by World War I and re-established in 1920 under the auspices of the Kāwhia South Athletic Club at Arthur Porteous’ paddock on the corner of Te Waitere and Whakapirau roads.
Coast Sports celebrated its centennial event in 2020, with a crowd of 700 or 800, organisers said. That year, locals dug up old programmes and found the events had changed little despite the passage of a century.
The committee called off the 2022 event, “due to the uncertainty of swings in the Covid-19 pendulum”, committee treasurer/chair Mary Anderson said at the time.
The committee would start working towards the next event in about August this year, Marcus said. They all knew their roles well and expected it to be no fuss.
