I Had Never Heard Of The Sport Of Kiiking,

until today,

 it appears that in Estonia, it’s a passion they never grew out of, both children and adults take huge delight in swings,

 taking that love of swings one stage further, you might remember as a kid that you could try and swing over the top and make a 360 degree spin,

but it was not for the fainthearted as the local A & E would attest on school holidays as an almost continuous line of injured kids that had attempted the manoeuvre and failed can attest, (and I was one year one of them), which is why in 1993, an Estonian man by the name of Ado Kosk created a pair of wooden swings designed specifically for going all the way around the spindle, they were rudimentary contraptions made up of simple levers with a pair of wooden rods attached to a flat seat on one end and the rotating spindle on the other, nobody knew it at the time, but that was when kiiking was born,

and if you have not tried to loup the loup on a swing, these two videos,

will show you what you are missing, “When you are standing upside down and looking at the ground and all around you—and you know that you cannot fall down—well, it feels like you are between heaven and ground,” Laansalu, who founded Kiiking.com, told Stowaway Magazine, “I have never felt anything like that anywhere” Her kiiking record stands at 4.83 meters, which is not too shabby, but the Guinness World Record stands at a seemingly unbeatable 7.15 meters, it was set on September 16, 2015, by an Estonian kiiker named Kaspar Taimsoo, kiiking, never heard of it till today, now where is a swing I can try it out on?