Barrel Jumping
Long jumping on ice skates appears to have been an informal sport in the 19th century among the Dutch. It may have grown out of obstacle races, in which speed skaters had to jump over fences, walls, and man-made barriers.
The 20th-century version of the sport certainly grew out of speed skating. During the 1920s and 1930s, barrels were often placed to mark the boundaries of a racing course. Evidently some skaters began amusing themselves and spectators before and after competition by laying the barrels on their sides and jumping over them.
Edmund Lamy, one of America's best speed skaters of the time, set the first known record with a jump of 27 feet, 8 inches, at Saranac Lake, New York, in 1925. It's known how many barrels he cleared in the process. Since barrels weren't standardized then, the question is probably unimportant. But the distance remained a record for more than a quarter-century.
Irving Jaffee, the Olympic gold medal speed skater who was a contemporary of Lamy's, probably did a fair amount of barrel jumping in that era, but he made his mark on the sport by organizing the first specialized tournament, at Grossinger's Country Club in the Catskills, in 1951. Jaffee also standardized the size of the barrels at 16 inches in diameter and 30 inches in length.
Terrance Brown set a new record by jumping 15 barrels and 28 feet, 3 inches, at the second world championship tournament at Grossinger's in 1952. The present record of 18 barrels (29 feet, 5 inches) was set by Yvon Jolin of Canada on Jan. 25, 1981.
Barrel jumping got considerable exposure in movie newsreels during the 1950s and the sport was often featured on ABC's Wide World of Sports during the next two decades. However, it's declined greatly since about 1980. The major reason is probably that speed skaters have become so dedicated to their primary sport that they refuse to waste time on a sport that is both dangerous and essentially frivolous for their purposes.
Occasional competitions are still held in the Province of Quebec, most notably as part of the Quebec and Montreal winter carnivals, and barrel jumping exhibitions are sometimes included in ice shows. But the sport is definitely on the decline.
The Canadian Barrel Jumping Federation at one time had hopes that barrel jumping could become an Olympic sport. However, Federation President Gilles Leclerc has given up on that idea.
"We cannot do it," Leclerc said in a recent interview with Outing magazine. "Now there are fewer countries, and the people are discouraged. When you are refused all the time, all the good jumpers stop training. Instead of going forward, we are going back."