Tim the Yowie Man checks out the Golden Gumboot Throwing Competition after a 28-year hiatus from the Murrumbateman Field Days.
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00:00After a 28-year hiatus the much-missed Murrumbateman Field Day's golden
00:06gumboot throwing competition is back this October. But how exactly to best
00:14throw a gumboot? It's not easy. You could always study historic footage from the
00:201996 event but unless you want everyone in the crowd to don a helmet I wouldn't
00:26bother. At least this official got a workout retrieving a boot from the top
00:33of a truck. You could also gate crash a training session where Tom White and
00:38Joe Shipley from the Murrumbateman Field Days are secretly finessing their own
00:44techniques. But even then you'd probably still be at a loss. Do you throw
00:49underarm, sidearm, overarm? Just how do you do it? Well short of jet-setting
00:56across the Tasman to the gumboot throwing capital of the world in Taihape
01:01in New Zealand the best advice I've managed to find for any wannabe
01:06competitors comes from Professor Ben Buchler of the ANU Research School of
01:12Physics. It's pretty simple you just gotta throw as hard as you can. You want
01:17the boot to move as fast through the air as you can make it go. It's going to go
01:20the furthest and then you want to be traveling through the air in the right
01:24orientation. And so I think you want to minimize the surface area so probably
01:27sole forwards. It's going to minimize the surface area. That'd probably be the worst.
01:31I don't know if you could throw it with the side forward. That'd be really hard. Because the
01:35other thing to get this part moving as fast as it will go you've got to use a
01:39mechanical advantage of this long leg bit. It's kind of like throwing a ball
01:44for a dog we have those throwers. This is the handle. This is the center of mass
01:47up here and you give it a toss like that you get the center of mass moving faster
01:51than your hand and that's going to give you the longest throw. And how would you
01:55release it out of your hand? Are we going to do it you think an underarm throw,
01:58sidearm or like those hammer throwers at the Olympics? Yeah look I think it'll
02:02probably depend on the person. The lighter weight person will have more trouble
02:06getting this thing moving real fast. A discus kind of throw, a hammer throw,
02:11if you want to get maximum hand velocity whatever works for you. If you're a really big guy
02:14then maybe going overarm might work for you but you just want to maximize your
02:18hand velocity and then the velocity of the center of mass is that you release it from your hand.
02:22Now you sound like you know what you're talking about. How many times have you
02:25thrown a gumboot Ben? Zero times Tim, zero.