Medieval sport charges into PNE
Visitors can experience full-contact jousting as competitors try to knock one another off horses
New to the PNE fair this summer is the chance to see the centuries-old sport of jousting, with modern-day knights in shining armour charging toward one another to try to knock each other off their respective horses.
“This is a full-contact competition, it’s not a choreographed show,” said Shane Adams, a Canadian who has brought the Knights of Valour show to the PNE for the first time.
If the show weren’t a real competition, “you might as well go to the Medieval Times dinner show in Toronto.”
Adams started out jousting theatrically 26 years ago on the dinner theatre circuit, until he attended his first international competition in Colorado in 1997.
He ended up winning the tournament and was hooked.
“I had a broken wrist and fractured ribs but
I won,” he said.
“I quickly realized I had a knack for it.”
Since then he’s been staging tournaments, like the one that runs throughout the fair.
Six knights will compete in pairs at the daily shows in the Agrodome in a contest that Adams describes as two men wearing 150 lbs. of full stainless steel armour atop their 2,000 lb. horses charging at each other at 25 km/h.
“So that’s almost a combined total of 5,000 pounds and combined speed of 50 kilometres an hour,” he said.
The knights have affixed to their breast plate, over their hearts, a piece of stainless steel the size of a dinner plate called a girded grand guard.
The object of the competition is to hit his opponent’s guard, for one point, with the lance.
If the knight breaks his own lance, which is made of Douglas fir and not weak balsa wood as with the theatrical shows, he gets an additional five points.
“Unhorsing” his opponent scores him another 10 points.
“At the first show at the PNE (on the weekend), we had a double unhorsing,” said Adams. “Both knights were hit and both were ejected onto the ground before picking themselves up and getting back on their horses.”
The knights usually have five passes at one another but the marshal can end the tilt earlier if one of the knights is unhorsed twice or for other safety concerns, said Adams.
The knight with the most points at the end of the fair will win champion of the PNE and his pay packet “will have an extra zero in it,” he said.
“What we do is real and no one can actually perceive it until they see it with their own eyes,” he said.
The shows, free with admission to the fair, run daily at 1, 3 and 7 p.m. (except Tuesday, Aug. 21, when there is no 1 p.m. show.)