With The Onset Of Winter Soon Upon Us,

I remembered a film I watched long ago, 

photograph ©Brooklyn Daily Eagle, so long ago I have forgotten its name, but one thing I do remember is a scene at a open air ice rink where hardy fellows jumped over barrels, a sport apparently now no longer popular, but was regularly performed at the Grossinger’s holiday resort in New York’s Catskill mountains, 

photograph ©patch.com as far as the sport is concerned, the participants circle the rink building up speed and then launch themselves over the barrels, “It requires a lot of courage. Why, some of those boys are going fifty miles an hour when they’re over the barrels,” explained one of the sport’s organisers back in the 1930s. “Once we tried to lengthen the landing space so the jumpers wouldn’t crash so hard. They refused to allow it. They wanted less landing room so they could have more space to skate and build up speed for their jumps. These guys are wild men.”

photograph ©Dick Loek, Toronto Public Library, looking at the above and the video below, it seemed it was de rigueur to have a heavy landing! broken ankles, a shattered pelvis and cuts that required three rounds of stitches were common in what was perhaps the grandfather of today’s extreme sports, Barney Ross, the late boxing champion, once said, “I’d rather take 15 rounds of punishment in the ring than do what those barrel jumpers do.”

“We must have speed and guts,” declared Gilles Leclerc, former president of the now obsolete Canadian Barrel Jumping Federation, Grossinger’s would host the championship for the next quarter of a century, and it became  a staple on ABC’s Wide World of Sports television programme. “I won two Olympic gold medals as a speed skater, both in 1932, and I’ve played some hockey,” explained Jaffee to Sports Illustrated in 1961, “but I’d never have the guts to try barrel jumping.”

the name of Grossinger’s Catskill Resort may have faded into memory, but it was once a byword for luxurious recreation. Located two hours north of Manhattan, Grossinger’s was the jewel of what was once known as the ‘Borscht Belt’, a concentration of resorts, hotels and holiday camping grounds that catered to mostly Jewish affluent New Yorkers, overseen by Jenny Grossinger, the resort was spectacular: three swimming pools, grand ballrooms, a dining room large enough to seat 1,700, and nightclubs such as the Terrace Room and glitzy Pink Elephant, that played host to the likes of Mel Brooks, Jack Benny and Milton Berle. At its heyday in the 1950s, over 150,000 pleasure seekers were coming to Grossinger’s every year. No wonder one review in 1954 described Grossinger’s as, “to resort hotels as Bergdorf Goodman is to department stores, Cadillac to cars, and mink to furs.”

photograph ©Luke J Spencer, for decades, the federation lobbied to have the sport included in the Winter Olympics, even sending a live demonstration team to the build up of the 1994 Lillehammer games in Norway. First watching a video of barrel jumping in action, the Olympic Committee were horrified; Tor Aune, a member on the Organising Committee said, “It appeared to be a brutal sort of sport. Everybody falls on their backside.” the live demonstration was cancelled, and the sport died out soon after, above the last sign of barrel jumping at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort, will the sport ever return? who knows.