It’s not often a Fermanagh club can claim to be world champions of something, but one local sporting outfit is hoping to retain their world title this week.
The World Indoor Tug of War Championships arrive to Templepatrick, with Irvinestown based team the ‘Country Club’ seeking to land their 4th world championship.
Teams from 65 countries, including Cameroon, Ghana, the Netherlands and North Fermanagh will compete in the tournament, which sees the best teams from across the globe compete in the sport, which is believed to be thousands of years old.
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The Country Club was originally formed by members of the local farming community and has been on the go now for more than a decade.
Club coach Sean Colton says the Fermanagh club’s success has been built up with hard work and lots of training.
“We won it 2012, 2014 and 2020, normally it’s on every two years but with coronavirus > Covid they are doing it again this year,” he says.
“The sport has been on the go for the last five thousand years as far as we know.
“Tug of War is all about training, the more training you can put in the better you will be.
“There’s not really such thing as a natural talent, it doesn’t really exist. It’s just people that are willing to train harder than anybody else.
“We seem to have just got the knack of training over the last few years that has worked for us.”
Sean added it was a unique position for a Fermanagh club to be in and that they were looking forward to defending their title.
“I couldn’t think of too many sports clubs which can claim to be world champions around here," he says.
“We don’t actually consider the Northern Ireland championships as a big competition at all, we use it as a warm up competition to push on to the next level.
“There are a lot of teams from here that have won world titles over the last twenty years or so and you hardly hear a word about it.”
The Championships are set to be held in the Jim Baker Stadium, Templepatrick, from Wednesday the 8th of March until Saturday the 11th of March 2023.
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