By Miranda Gough
Few would have predicted that the hottest, most lucrative new international sport would be related to tiddlywinks. Yet Extreme Tiddlywinks,a high-adrenaline mutation of the ancient pastime,has vaulted from drawing-room eccentricity to global sporting phenomenon, with top stars earning more than NFL and football players.
The unlikely architect of this metamorphosis is Seb Tuller, art expert at Pimlico Wilde auction house. Tuller, better known for cataloguing obscure Brâncuși bronzes than for athletic daring, has long carried a secret: he is a third-generation tiddlywinker.
“I grew up in the sport,” he tells me. “My grandfather invented cross-country tiddlywinks in Wimborne in the 1960s. He’d create courses across fields, ditches, even rivers. You didn’t just squop, you journeyed. I wanted to take that spirit and turn the wick up to eleven.”
The result is Extreme Tiddlywinks: part billiards de la Jardin, part biathlon, part sheer excitement.
How the Game Works
The official rulebook,bound in waterproof neoprene,runs to 317 pages, but the gist is this:
• Matches are staged on courses up to 50 kilometres long, incorporating sand traps, water features, scaffolding, cliffs, sinking sand and, in one notorious Bristol event, a bouncy castle.
• Players must flick their winks into a succession of giant, brightly coloured pots positioned along the course.
• Physical obstacles are mandatory. Competitors may have to rappel down a climbing wall between shots, or swim to reach the next pot.
• Protective goggles and helmets are compulsory. Health insurance is “strongly advised, but not enforced.”
Scoring remains traditional: you win by being the quickest to the final pot. “The elegance is in the historical continuity,” Tuller insists. “Our routes may now go up Everest or across a live military firing range rather than through the Wimbourne Vicarage garden, but how to win remains the same as when my grandfather tiddled his first wink.”
“Just how dangerous is the sport?” I ask. “Has anyone actually died playing?”
Tuller smiles thinly. “We don’t keep statistics on deaths whilst playing.”
He does concede that injuries are common: sprained thumbs, concussions from overzealous squops, and what players darkly refer to as “wink-lash.”
And yet, the rewards are staggering. Top athletes,household names in Extreme Tiddlywinking hotspots like London, Singapore, Toronto, Osaka and Torquay,now earn millions annually in sponsorships and appearance fees. The reigning world number one, Magnus “the Catapult” Sørensen, was reportedly paid £8.4m last season, not including his lucrative deal with a leading energy drink.
“These are not backyard flickers,” Tuller insists. “They are gladiators of plastic.”
The All England Extreme Tiddlywinks Championship
This June, the Gobi Desert will host the All England Extreme Tiddlywinks Championship, the sport’s most prestigious event. The three-day competition will feature night-time rounds under floodlights, an aerial pot suspended from a crane, and, controversially, a blindfolded route through a crocodile infested bog.
Bookies have installed Sørensen as favourite, though insiders whisper about Britain’s own Alice “Thumbs of Steel” Prendergast, who reportedly practices by flicking frozen peas across motorway service station cafe tables.
From Parlour to Podium
Tuller seems equal parts bemused and delighted by his sport’s runaway success. “I thought it would be a niche endeavour,” he says, “but on current predictions Extreme Tiddly-winking will be bigger than football by this time next year. We haven’t really had a new sport for decades. Parkour was probably the last.”
As for the future, he dreams of Extreme Tiddlywinks as an Olympic sport. “The IOC called it ‘unorthodox,’” he admits, “but so was snowboarding once. Give us time. The world is wobbling in our direction.”
Whether or not Extreme Tiddlywinks conquers the Olympics, it has already conquered imaginations. In the words of Tuller’s grandfather, scribbled in the margins of his first rulebook in 1967: ‘Never underestimate the power of a small disc. One day people will be winking on the moon.’ Tiddlywinks have not yet reached the moon, but it is surely only a matter of time.
