07-20-2008
The Gooding Basque Festival had a lot to offer to spectators, including good food and traditional dancing. Another piece of Basque culture for people to see was a traditional Basque sport demonstration.
Jon Vergara put on a demonstration about a sport that athletes compete in at Basque festivals across the United States and in the Basque country.
The sport is all about lifting heavy objects such as a stone or cylinder. In a competition, athletes have either three or five minutes to lift the object as many times as they can.
The cylinder used in Gooding weighed 227 pounds, and the stone cube weighed 250 pounds. Vergara lifted the cylinder seventeen times in the three minute demonstration. In a competition in Elko earlier this year, he was able to lift the cyliner twenty-two times.