Ros Davidson Highland Games
California might seem a strange place to stage Highland Games, but that is not the only unusual feature of this weekend’s 133rd annual Scottish Games and Gathering near San Francisco.
For alongside the men in kilts throwing huge wooden cabers and lumps of granite will be the graceful form of Shannon Hartnett, the undisputed top woman of Scottish “heavy athletics”.
Hartnett, a karate expert and former bodybuilder, has swept all United States and international women’s titles since she first convinced organisers to establish a women’s division, at the San Francisco games seven years ago.
More than 50 females now compete at dozens of meets in North America and, for the first time, at a Highland Games in Scotland just a few weeks ago.
The 33-year-old women’s world champ will defend her US title, as always, in a mini-kilt of vibrant MacLaod tartan. As holder of 14 world records, Hartnett is expected to retain her crown with ease.
In Arizona in February, she successfully defended her world title, as she has every year since it was established three years ago. In July, she broke the record for the “52kg weight for distance” at Callander in Scotland, featuring on BBC Television’s Record Breakers.
Although a born-and-bred Californian, Hartnett prefers competing in Scotland because of the weather, sense of history and the camaraderie. The games are less regimented than in America, she says, and are thus more challenging. Cabers and weights vary more in size and shape, for example. The weather is unpredictable.
“Plus you always get to see 135kg guys in little mini-skirts,” jokes Hartnett, who at 69kg and 1,6m is more lithe than most female competitors. She is also one of the few caber- tossers with a pierced navel and manicured hands.
She has always been athletic and used to compete as a heptathlete. At college she was a basketball star and rower, and then got into bodybuilding and weightlifting. It seems she will try almost anything – she was once the “world pillow-fighting champion”. When she heard about Scottish disciplines from someone she worked out with at a gym, she tried them and was smitten.
She maintains it had little to do with her ancestry, which includes Scottish as well as Irish, Norwegian and Swedish. It was far more the friendliness of those on the circuit, the frequency and number of events, and the “rawness” of the events themselves. “They’re closer to what sports would originally have been,” she says.
The San Francisco event attracts the biggest crowd on the international Highland Games circuit, which ranges from Canada and Australia to Hong Kong and Hawaii.
Even in the shade it will be about 32C, enough to wilt the sporrans of the Strathclyde Police Pipe Band, flown in from Glasgow to open the show. As well as 50 or so clan tents, there will be something called Haggis pat, the occasional kilt mistakenly worn backwards, and Highland dancers wearing dark glasses.
All of which ensures the event will seem half a world away from the chill, rain and mud so typical of the Scottish original.
Hartnett shares her small home, on a woody hill just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, with four cats and a dog called Athena, named after the Greek goddess. Her day job is running a women’s gym but she spends about half of the year on the road, mostly attending Highland Games.
She is in a nationally rated women’s softball team and is a serious enough climber that she plans to attempt Mount Everest in October (a few years ago, she scaled Annapurna). The Guinness Book of Records has invited her to attempt a “truck pull” record later this month. That means she will try to drag an eight-ton truck for 50m, something that has never been done before by a woman.
Despite getting women into Highland Games, Hartnett has been less successful in getting women access to the same prize money and financial backing as men. She concedes that it is a losing battle, for now at least.
“I’ve quit arguing with a bunch of old Scottish men who are never going to change their mind and say, `Oh yeah, equal rights for women,'” she says.
“I can’t always be in my warrior mode. There’s more to life. There’s Everest, I own my own business, and I’ve got great friends. In Scottish events, my goal now is just to throw every day and enjoy it.”