WEIGHTS AND WEIGHT - THROWERS Throwing the weights is a game for big men. It is not a sport in which the athlete of slender build, however wiry and active he may be, can successfully indulge. A big frame and plenty of beef are a necessity, and a good head of steam behind them. It takes your Flanagans and Mitchells, Plaws and Becks and Roses, to do this sort of work. Praxiteles must give way to Michael Angelo, and light-footed Mercury to broad-backed, colossal Hercules.
What the weights lose in the thrill of swift grace and breathless competition they make up, to a certain extent, in the picture they give of statuesque strength and power. The mighty man who can send the sixteen-pound hammer hurling through the air for one hundred fifty feet is bound to be worth looking at, to have a big, smooth symmetry of development which is lacking in his leaner and more angular brothers of the track. There is a certain majesty in the swing of his great shoulders, in the pillar-like stability of his braced legs. Standing there alone on the field in the centre of his seven-foot circle, swinging the hammer around and around as though his whole body were a great animate spring which he was somehow winding up, he unconsciously but inevitably falls into the sculp tor's poses, and every now and again, when his form is perfect, realizes a unity and rhythm of motion which could, with almost ideal results, be frozen into stone. Putting the shot is a less impressive exercise ; the skill of it is little revealed in the performance, and yet it too has its statu esque beauty. There stands your shot-putter, poised for the throw, one leg holding his weight like a pillar, the toe of the other tapping the ground tentatively and as lightly as a ballet dancer, the left arm stretched out rigidly straight and veering with the balance, the putting arm drawn back into a great coiled spring of muscle with the shot resting lightly in the palm ; this, thrown out sharply against the green of the turf and the darker green of the trees that surround it, is well worth a moment of any one's eye, even though our Hercules proves a duffer, tangles up his feet, finishes his second hop with a weak half turn presently, puts no lift or elevation into his throw, and thumps the shot on to the cinders a scant thirty feet away.
Hurling the hammer and putting the shot began with the Scotch and Irish, so the track tradition runs, and the Celts particularly seem to take by nature to the sport of throwing the weights. Whether on this side of the water or on the other, it has been the Flanagans and Mitchells and Kieleys and Horgans and Barrys who have, from year to year, most often dug up turf at the farthest distance from the line of the seven-foot circle or the edge of the take-off joist. There is a tradition that the hurling of the chariot wheel — a sport which we presume was practised when there were still kings in Ireland, was the genesis of hammer-throwing, while shot-putting, which is said to have come down from the High lands, is, of course, a mere refining on the primi tive throwing of the stone. Hammer-throwing is one of the light diversions in which that hardy monarch, King Henry the Eighth of England, is said to have indulged. It was not until i866 that the weight of the hammer-head was set in Eng land at sixteen pounds, and there was at that time no limit to the length of the handle, which, until 1896, was of wood. The English threw from a nine-foot circle until 1875, and put from a seven-foot square. In that year both areas were changed to seven-foot circles, which, in i886, were again changed to circles whose diameters were nine feet. In America from 1876 to 1886 the hammer head, without the handle, weighed sixteen pounds, and the length of the handle was limited to 3 feet 6 inches. Since and in cluding 1887, the hammer complete, head and handle, weighs sixteen pounds, and the length of the handle is four feet. In 1888 the seven foot circle was established in this country for both the hammer and the shot. Within this circle the hammer-thrower may do anything that he chooses, but he must not step over it in releasing the hammer or the shot.