Weed wacked

In her women's endurance quarterfinal round against Penny Halvorson, Dany Boulanger was well ahead until she began the crosscut saw stage. Halfway through her cut, Boulanger slowed, tried to restart, slowed further and finally stopped.

It appeared the saw had gotten hung in the wood, but Boulanger had exhausted herself. At the end, she said, her arms and legs felt like needles were jabbing into them.

Her explanation was simple lack of conditioning. The Quebec resident said she's been working the land around a factory that makes explosives. She and a couple of other men with tractors clear the area of brush and weeds.

After days spent weed-eating the 45-degree earthen banks the factory builds to contain possible explosions, Boulanger said, she's had no energy to train properly.

"I'll take this as a vacation," she said.

Halvorson was gracious in her fortunate win.

"I won against one of the most awesome women in the world," she said.

Man versus machine

In an event often decided by human error, Dave Bolstad suffered the distinction of being the only Hot Saw competitor to lose because of mechanical failure. After a clean first cut, he threw his chain on his second cut, allowing eventual silver medalist Dave Jewett an easy pass to the second round.

After collecting himself, Bolstad stalked back to his toolbox. He set the chainsaw with the 325-cc engine on a folding table and used a socket wrench to removed the cover to the hub. He freed the chain, which hung loose like a hellish bicycle chain off its gear.

Turned out that during routine maintenance earlier in the day, he forgot to secure the hub with Loctite, a liquid thread-locker. He squirted and smeared a layer of the blue liquid from a small tube and re-assembled the hub.

So it was human error, after all. But Bolstad remained upbeat as he rolled the chain into a protective bath towel for the night.

"She tore that first one up, didn't she?" he said. "Live another day. Breathe."

I wish I could do it again

From the foot-in-mouth department: In interviewing Jason Wynyard after he won the Hot Saw bronze, ESPN analyst John Hughes apparently lost track of the round. He finished his first question to Wynyard by asking, "Do you think you can win the gold with this saw?"

Wynyard sent the crowd into uproarious laughter when he replied, "I just won the bronze here. So I think I'm pretty much out of it."

Hughes raised his arms and smiled to acknowledge his gaffe. Then he turned right back to Wynyard and asked, "You just won the bronze. How do you feel?"

Wrestling with gold

When the Archery competition gets underway, Chris Berry will be fighting to win the gold. But a fight Berry was in two weeks ago could actually keep him from it.

Berry isn't a fighter by trade. He's actually a Deputy Sheriff in Lawrence County, Mo. It's not Mayberry but by most accounts it is peaceful most of the time. Berry, though, had an altercation with a drunk and wound up wrestling in a ditch with the intoxicated pugilist before Berry could get handcuffs on him.

The drunk was impeding the Sheriff's department from working an automobile accident. He wasn't a part of it, he was just out driving around a field with a tractor pulling a brush hog at 2:30 a.m. and continually trying to hook up to one of the vehicles and pull it off. His actions degraded into turning doughnuts in the field with the tractor and in general causing a spectacle.

"We'd asked him to leave the scene several times,'' Berry said. "But he just kept causing more trouble. We eventually decided it was time to go to jail."

The drunk didn't go too peacefully. The two ended up wrestling in the ditch.

The result. The drunk got to spend some time in jail. And Berry has spent a lot of the last two weeks getting over a back injury, one that has taken him off the archery range and out of practice.

"The first time I could stand up a draw a bow was Tuesday,'' Berry said Thursday.

The history of it all

The timber events at the Great Outdoor Games prize swiftness in sawing, efficiency in chopping. In this regard, they're a historical oddity, said Jonathan Kenoyer, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Wisconsin.

"This whole idea of speed is a modern invention," said Kenoyer, who's teaching a summer class called Ancient Technology and Invention. People in early societies, he said, had little reason to rush when they chopped down a tree to build a canoe or reach honey in its upper branches. Whether the task took a day or two or three, it didn't matter. People would make a social event of it. "You have a party and cook a pig," he said.

The stone tools people used in Africa, India, China and the Americas were actually better than steel for cutting and finishing, he said. But the modern emphasis on speed propelled the use of steel blades, which can be fashioned and sharpened more quickly.

Kenoyer's students replicate old technologies so they can recognize them during archeological digs. The students begin with simple stone tools, work up to adding handles, then learn to cut stone using abrasives such as sand and string.

If that sounds tedious, well, it's the way the world once worked.

"You didn't just chop down a tree," Kenoyer said. "You chopped down a tree for a reason. Speed wasn't the issue, unless you were racing winter and needed a log cabin or something. And if you were stupid enough to wait that long, you were probably going to die anyway."

Hot sawyers

Hot Saw competitors Harry Burnsworth and Mike Sullivan, ranked No. 1 and No. 3 in the world, both issued harsh criticisms of Great Outdoor Games rules after they were bounced from the event Thursday.

Burnsworth, the event's top seed, appeared to have passed the first round when he out-sawed Jason Wynyard, who finished half a second slower and without making three clean cuts. But when judges ruled that Burnsworth had also cut an incomplete disk, the sawyers met in a one-cut saw-off that Wynyard won handily.

Burnsworth said he was doomed in the saw-off when he planted his back foot on a knot in the wood stage. In the split moment it took to find purchase with his spikes, he was doomed.

"Three (cuts), it would have been no problem," Burnsworth said. "One, there's no time to make it up."

While Burnsworth criticized the saw-off format, Sullivan ripped the rule that forbids competitors from making more than three cuts. In his first-round heat against J.P. Mercier, Sullivan's first cut came out the end of the log, leaving him with a barely incomplete cookie.

Sullivan said that had he been allowed to restart his cut as soon as he knew it was askew, he would have caught and beaten Mercier.

"Jackass rule," Sullivan said. "This is basically a drag race. It's like telling a drag racer, 'If you hit the throttle and see you're going into the wall, you just have to crash. You can't pull back on the throttle.' They should just say, 'Here's your seven inches of wood.' If it takes seven cuts to get three disks, you should get seven cuts."