White River Junction
Flynn, a 58-year-old White River Junction resident, returned to the World Boomerang Championships last month for the first time in six years, placing 45th of 115 competitors while a guest member of Kanga, an Australia-based team that placed eighth of 18 squads from throughout Europe, Asia and North America.
This year’s WBC was held in the northern Germany port city of Kiel for the first time since Flynn’s U.S. team placed first overall in 2002.
Flynn played on 10 U.S. teams from 1984-2010, winning four WBC team titles and a pair of individual bronze medals. He’d planned to return to Kiel this summer as a member of the Old Goats, a U.S. 50-and-over outfit, but eventually obliged after being invited to join the Aussies’ lone unit.
“I’ve competed a lot against (Kanga thrower) Rob Croll and we’ve been buddies for a long time,” said Flynn, who scrapped an annual tournament he typically hosts in late July at West Lebanon’s Sachem Field in order to return to Germany. “When he said he had an opening, I recommended for (western Massachusetts resident) Adam Ruhf to fill in, but he couldn’t, so I decided to go ahead and fill the spot.”
Like many boomerang tournaments, the World Boomerang Championships feature a series of competitive categories including maximum time aloft, trick catching — think behind-the-back receptions or the Hacky Sack method, where the boomerang must be kicked back into the air before catching it — as well as fundamental-skill tests such as accuracy (throwing into targets) and endurance (aspiring for as many successful throws and catches as possible over five minutes).
Kanga finished in the top 10 in nine events and four in the top five, including runner-up scores in a relay competition combining several events on July 24 and a team endurance event the following day.
Kanga’s biggest disappointment came during its namesake Aussie Round, which combines accuracy, distance and catching skills. The Australians finished fifth, eight points behind Switzerland-based Swiss Scandal and 63 back of defending overall tournament champion Japan.
“The Aussie Round is quite a big event for everyone, because it involves the original and most fundamental skills of boomerang throwing,” Flynn said. “Australia is recognized as the birthplace of the sport, which is why the event is named for it. We were pretty geared up for that and would like to have come out on top, but just didn’t have our best outing.”
The competition included plenty of weather variables, including light rain over the second half of the tourney and shifting, unpredictable wind currents that can quickly become unfavorable.
“There is a lot that goes into your release (of throws),” Flynn said. “You might feel a wind current at the last moment that causes you to throw it just a little bit differently to adjust, and even then sometimes it all depends on what the wind does after it gets into the air.”
For some events, including endurance, Kanga was stationed near a patch of trees abutting the open field — where wind conditions are especially volatile.
“Referees acknowledged that they shouldn’t have placed us there for (team endurance),” said Flynn, whose team placed 11th in that event. “There is a lot of turbulence next to the trees. It’s predictable only in the sense that you know it’s going to be really difficult to track where (your boomerang) goes.”
The trip didn’t start off conveniently for Flynn, whose luggage, checked in at Boston’s Logan Airport on July 21, still hasn’t been retrieved. Fortunately, Flynn’s competition kit was amid his carry-on bags, but the missing luggage left him without a number of other travel essentials.
“It was a big distraction,” Flynn said. “No toiletries, no contact lenses, no cleats, no ibuprofen or any of the things that allow a 58-year-old to run around a field all day for a week. I didn’t go out and buy a lot of (replacement items), because 99 percent of the time the bags show up within a day or two.”
Flynn admits he probably wouldn’t do the trip over again if he knew it meant losing his luggage — it also contained a few boomerangs and sentimental items from previous trips — yet it was nonetheless refreshing to get back to WBC and Kiel, site of his most recent championship with the U.S. 14 years ago.
“It’s the first time this tournament returned to the exact site of a previous championship,” Flynn said. “We all stayed in the same hostel, and the staff there remembered us and were very welcoming. They even brought out and hung up the big poster from 2002, which they’d kept.”
Flynn, a New London native who began throwing boomerangs in earnest after graduating from the University of New Hampshire in 1980, has seen the popularity of his sport ebb and flow over the years. A sales engineer by trade, Flynn designs and constructs many of his own boomerangs, constantly tweaking and carving out specs he feels will aid performance.
While many of his peers produce their own boomerangs, Flynn doesn’t think a physicist’s mentality is required to enjoy the sport.
“The designing and building is just a hobby part of it,” he said. “You can get really good boomerangs for $15-$30, so I don’t think cost is why there aren’t as many young people playing the sport as there was in the mid-to-late-80s. I think it’s mostly because it’s a hard sport. It’s hard to do well.”
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.