As the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness arrives, the leaves shed from trees in a blaze of color, making their way straight for train tracks. The autumnal light rears up at acute angles, a dazzling reminder that it’s always too early to put away your sunglasses. It’s this time of year when sports fans’ thoughts turn naturally to one of the great annual showpiece tournaments. We’re talking, of course, about the World Conker Championships, which has generated more media interest in the past week than England’s men’s and women’s cricket teams combined.
Normally, it’s small children who obsess over the shiny brown treasures foraged from the footpath. But recent events have proven that adults, too, go bonkers over conkers. If you’ve managed to miss the story – how, exactly? – the headline is that the newly crowned men’s world champion, David Jakins, has been accused of cheating. The runner-up was suspicious when his own conker shattered on impact during their bout. Asked to turn out his pockets, Jakins was found in possession of a steel conker painted to look like a real one.
The champion, aka “King Conker”, maintains his innocence and insists he uses it only for pranking kids. The ring judge insisted that Jakins, like all contestants, picked his nut blind from a bag full of tournament issue. Doctored conkers just aren’t possible. But the organisers now say they have extended their investigation, “following new evidence coming to light”. Is it, possibly, the evidence that cheating makes for great publicity? After all, certain sports only command national attention when there’s a possibility that someone broke the rules.
Not many people can name the top three chess players in the world, but Hans Niemann, currently ranked 18th, has been famous ever since the Norwegian world champion Magnus Carlsen lost to him in 2022 and immediately refused to play him again. The subsequent furore lent chess a sexy sheen of scandal for months. Niemann was found innocent of every allegation against him, and has since settled the dispute with Carlsen, after admitting to cheating in “random” online games as a teenager. But it’s not often that a 20-year-old is forced to sit down for an interview with Piers Morgan and answer the question: “Have you ever used anal beads while playing chess?” then have to deny using a sex toy to receive secret messages during games.
You can say-it-aint-so-Joe all you like, but most sports fans love the drama of a cheating scandal. And we seem to particularly appreciate them in the fringe sports that would otherwise pass us by. Somehow they manage to tickle both sides of our brain simultaneously – both the sophisticated, self-aware part that recognises the utter absurdity of the competitive pastimes we have invented, and the ancestral part that wants to evict wrongdoers from our community and leave them to be eaten by bears. Trivial pursuits can have serious consequences. Two anglers were sentenced to 10 days in jail after they were found guilty in 2023 of cheating at an Ohio tournament, having stuffed their catch with lead weights and fish fillets in pursuit of the $30,000 prize.
The video taken in the immediate aftermath, when organisers gutted their haul and revealed their wrongdoing, suggests they were lucky to get away from their furious fellow competitors unharmed. Perhaps we’re drawn to these episodes because, for just a moment, we imagine we’re taking a collective moral stance. So much cheating in modern sport goes unpunished, from financial shenanigans to institutionalised doping. Some of it is positively normalised: witness the routine sight of footballers falling to the ground grasping at their faces like extras from a second world war movie.
Theoretically, sport only makes sense as a concept if people play it on level terms, and within the framework of arbitrary rules it sets for itself. In reality, a millionaire entrepreneur is trying to launch a version of the Olympics where competitors can juice themselves to the eyeballs, and England’s most successful, and coincidentally richest, football club is under investigation on multiple charges of breaking its own league’s financial rules (it denies the allegations). The modern line is that what benefits the individual – even the richest and most powerful of them – benefits all of us. What’s good for the industry is good for sport.
So perhaps, when the World Conkers Championship is subject to cheating rumours, we find ourselves feeling nostalgic for imagined simpler times, those good old Wacky Races days when cheating was as simple as jumping in a car halfway through running a marathon, or scoring a World Cup goal with your fist. Back then, it was easier to tell who the wrong’uns were. And who could blame the conker world if it helps to generate a bit of publicity for their event and its fundraising causes? I don’t want to say they have form, but two years ago, when Jakins prepared the conkers for the women’s final, his daughter won the title and a similar “investigation” was launched. A spokesperson duly assured concerned fans that no one had anal beads (or, presumably, fish fillets) inserted into their body.
What raises the profile of one conkers event raises the profile of them all. Some, like the Waveney Valley Conkers Tournament and the Peckham Conker Championships, have made it clear that they welcome sharp practice, be it baking your nuts, soaking them in vinegar, or even injecting them with resin. You could say it’s all about growing the game. I say it’s just not conkers.
