LEAPER COLONY

The strange Dutch sport of fierljeppen — “ditch vaulting” — began as a practical way for the local people to get around their waterlogged country. Instead of taking the long way round, people used poles to leap across waterways to adjacent bits of dry land.

These days, it’s a fantastic spectator sport in which contestants leap at a run onto a vertical pole planted in a canal and try to shimmy as high up as they can before velocity and gravity take their natural course. The current record leap is 22.21m, done by Jaco de Groot from Woerden, Utrecht, in 2017.