C3

By Robert LaFrance

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Mark Lanto will be going to Saint John this weekend to compete in the Maritime Horseshoe Championships that will be held in Lord Beaverbrook Arena. Lanto's entry into the contest will represent a comeback for the Manse Hill Road, Kincardine, man who competed for a decade beginning in the 1980s but who had to give up the sport because of back problems that resulted in trips to the operating room in 1994 and 1995.

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He has been practising for weeks for the event which will see dozens of the best horseshoe pitchers in the Maritimes take their places in the 3 ½ by 4 ½ foot boxes and throw the regulation shoes at the steel posts. Because he still finds it painful to bend over, he uses a stick to pick up his horseshoes from the ground.

"I was a member for eight or nine years and in 1988 I won the "B" singles in the New Brunswick Championships, then I went to the Maritimes and got fourth the next year," Lanto said. "I went back and played the next three or four years and was having real back trouble; after my two surgeries I quit and thought I was never going to play again."

He did ‘get the itch' and did play again though, and this fall he will be paired with a Nova Scotia man whom he's never even met in a bid to make an astounding comeback, perhaps even to walk away as part of the winning team on Saturday, August 30, or the next day as winner of the Singles competition.

A month ago Lanto was talking to Larry Lynch, the New Brunswick Horseshoe Association's (http://members.tripod.com/nbhpa/) president who urged him to take part in this year's Maritime competition.

"He said there was a guy from Nova Scotia who wanted a partner too. We're just partners; we don't know each other. We're going into this blind. We will practise Friday evening from six until nine, have a meeting and start competing Saturday at 9 a.m.," he said. "There will probably be around sixty people competing."

On the floor of the Lord Beaverbrook Arena will be portable boxes with the metal posts set 40 feet apart for the men and 30 feet apart for the women and those over 70. There will be different divisions and the method of scoring has changed since he last competed almost two decades ago. Now whoever reaches 40 points first is the winner.

"The other day I was throwing out here on my lawn and I threw 18 shoes and I had 13 ringers so the game would have been over," he explained. "I don't throw like that all the time; that was just a high game." Competitors can throw as many as forty shoes to try and get their 40 points. There will be about a dozen teams per division.

Although he doesn't yet know his partner's name at this month's competition, Mark Lanto hopes that next year he will.

"My brother Rick and I used to play partners a lot but he's out of it now, but next summer my son Christopher and I are going to go and play the New Brunswick Championships. He was playing with me today and getting better all the time. I had 18 ringers out of 40 and he had 10."