THE STIHL TIMBERSPORTS® CHAMPIONS TROPHY

Florence 17th May

The international STIHL TIMBERSPORTS® season kicks off in Florence, Italy with the Champions Trophy - the world's toughest lumberjack sports duel.

Australia's Brad De Losa is tipped to win, retaining his title of ‘Champion of Champions' which he fought hard to win last year.

The Champions Trophy, which is by far the toughest competition in lumberjack sports, will bring the world's top eight elite athletes together to battle it out at the famous Piazzale Michelangelo (Michelangleo Square) on 17th May, 3:30am (Australian Eastern Standard Time).

This high-performance sport demands intense strength and endurance as competitors strive to hit new personal best times with the axe and saw, setting new standards for excitement and action. Smashing four tree trunks into firewood in less than one minute, this head-to-head contest will certainly decide who is the best of the best in lumberjack sports and who deserves the Champion of Champions title.

In the Champions Trophy, athletes compete in four of the six STIHL® TIMBERSPORTS® disciplines, performed one after another without a break. Top times of about one minute for all four disciplines are possible. The competition starts with the chain saw discipline Stock Saw, in which a disc of wood sawn from a log with one downward cut, followed by the axe discipline Underhand Chop, which simulates chopping up a felled tree. Next comes the Single Buck, with a one-man crosscut saw about two meters in length. Finally, the athletes compete in the Standing Block Chop, which goes back to felling a tree with an axe…and hundredths of a second count!

The seamless transition from one discipline to another requires supreme stamina, precision and tactics, pushing the athletes to their absolute limits of performance.

Two athletes will face-off against each other in the quarter-finals, semi-finals, third-place finals and finals. Anyone defeated in the head-to-head competition is eliminated straight away from the contest, which is compressed into a time of about ninety minutes.

The world class team members are based on the 2014 World Championship rankings and are Brad De Losa (Australia), Jason Wynyard (New Zealand), Martin Komárek (Czech Republic), Dirk Braun (Germany), Stirling Hart (Canada), Arden Cogar (US), Christophe Geissler (Switzerland) and Italian local hero, Paolo Vicenzi.