It was Easter 1997, and the Sydney Royal Easter Show was running its last programme at the old Moore Park showground before the whole event shifted across the city. The woodchopping arena had a covered grandstand, a dirt apron and a row of timekeepers in white shirts, and the biggest event on the card was the Champion of Champions standing block, the unofficial world title in the discipline that more than any other sells woodchopping to people who have never heard of woodchopping. The standing chop asks an athlete to remove, by alternating angled blows, an entire vertical log from in front of himself, in a matter of seconds, while a stadium that has been waiting all afternoon watches for him to fail.
Somewhere in the trans-Tasman field that season was a 23-year-old from Kawakawa called Jason Wynyard. He was 1.95 metres tall and around 130 kilograms, with the frame of a man who had spent his adolescence carrying things heavier than himself. He had picked up his first axe at six. His father Pae had won world titles of his own on the same circuit, in front of crowds whose sons were now in the stand. Sydney would hand Wynyard its Champion of Champions title three times over his career. And 1997, his first full year as a professional, was the year everything else began.
That win was the start of a run that has not been matched in the sport since. Over the following twenty years Wynyard won the Stihl Timbersports Series world title fourteen times, took nine individual world championships, held world records in the standing block, the underhand and the single buck saw, and accumulated more than 230 titles around the world. He did all of it, from 1996 onwards, as a full-time professional, taking a show-ring craft and professionalising it to a level nobody in New Zealand had before. He died at 49, in October 2023, of a fast and aggressive lymphoma that took him five months from diagnosis. He was, by every internal measure the sport had, the best chopper anyone had ever seen.
This is the country he came from, what he did, and why a sport at the heart of the rural show calendar has its own Hillary, its own Snell.
Kawakawa and the family axe
Jason Wynyard was born on 14 November 1973. His iwi were Ngāpuhi, through his father Pae, and Ngāti Maniapoto, and his hometown was Kawakawa, the small Bay of Islands service town built around a 19th-century coal-mining seam, the railway that ran the coal out and, later, the country’s most photographed public toilets. Pae Wynyard chopped competitively right through Jason’s childhood. The axe boxes lived in the boot of the car, and Saturdays in summer were A and P shows, which is to say woodchopping shows, the long upper-North-Island circuit of Mamaku, Whangārei, Kerikeri, Helensville and Te Kūiti.
Pae won world titles of his own and was a fixture on the trans-Tasman show circuit in the years before woodchopping was televised. He put a first axe in his young son’s hands at six. Competing seriously came later. “I started woodchopping at the age of 14, mainly because my Dad was a competitor and I grew up going to competitions watching him.”
Before the sport paid his way, Jason drove concrete trucks. “I’d probably still be driving a concrete truck if I wasn’t travelling around woodchopping,” he said in 2009, at the height of his career. He went to Waitākere College in west Auckland, and he was already, in his last school years, an axeman of national-team calibre. At 16, in 1990, he became the youngest competitor ever named to the New Zealand Axemen’s Association senior team.
The Bolstads
To explain Jason Wynyard you have to explain the Bolstads, because between them the two families have defined New Zealand woodchopping for half a century. The two surnames sit on the same circuit, in the same disciplines, in the same trans-Tasman rivalry against the Australians, and on the small leaderboard of New Zealand world champions, in a way almost nothing else in the country’s sporting history quite matches.
Sonny Bolstad was the previous generation, a New Zealand representative axeman and, in his own family’s words, a world-class one. He competed against Pae Wynyard through the 1970s and into the 1980s. He was killed in a logging accident in 1988.
His son David Bolstad, a Rotorua axeman born in Taumarunui, was four years older than Jason Wynyard. By the time Wynyard turned professional in 1996, Bolstad was already an established senior international. Their fathers had defined an era. They were going to define the next one, and they both knew it.
It was never the modern football rivalry of two players who do not speak. The trans-Tasman woodchopping scene is small. Wynyard and Bolstad chopped for New Zealand together and were each other’s biggest threat in any individual final. Between 1997 and 2017 Wynyard won the Stihl Timbersports Series world title fourteen times, and David Bolstad, a five-time series champion between 2001 and 2008, was the man who most often interrupted him. New Zealand Geographic’s long feature Block busters describes the grassroots version of that world, the A and P show circuit both men came out of.
What competitive woodchopping is
The reasonable question, before going further, is what the sport itself actually is. The short version is that competitive woodchopping is a series of timed events in which an athlete uses an extremely sharp, precisely weighted hand axe or a hand-pulled crosscut saw or a tuned chainsaw to remove a defined volume of wood from a defined log as quickly as possible. The events are scored in seconds. The fastest time wins. The wood is real, the axes are real, the saws are real, and an entire afternoon of competition can swing on a few hundredths of a second.
There are six disciplines that make up the modern Stihl Timbersports world series, and they are easier to grasp one by one.
The standing block chop is the one Wynyard built his name on. The block is a 12-inch (305mm) vertical log lashed upright in a steel cradle. The athlete chops a deep angled notch into one face of the block, then reverses his stance and chops a matching notch into the opposite face, the two notches eventually meeting in the middle and the upper half of the block falling away. World-class competitors do this in the high teens of seconds. Wynyard held the world record in the discipline.
The underhand chop is the one most often shown in television highlights. The athlete stands on top of a horizontal log and chops directly downwards through the wood between his feet, alternating sides, with the axe tracking close to his own boots. Done well, the wood comes apart cleanly and the chopper finishes upright. It is the most exacting few seconds in the sport, and the least forgiving.
The springboard is the most baroque event in the sport and the one that telegraphs its 19th-century felling-camp origins more than any other. The athlete cuts a small notch in a vertical pole at chest height, drives a steel-shod plank into the notch, climbs onto the plank, cuts a second notch higher up, drives a second plank in, climbs again, and from a position high above the ground chops a 12-inch block off the top of the same pole. It is, in effect, a re-enactment of the way kauri and white pine were felled in standing native forest before chainsaws, when the cut had to be made above the buttressed base of the trunk.
The three sawing events sit alongside the chopping events. The single buck is one athlete pulling a single-handed crosscut saw the length of a coffin lid through a large white pine log. The stock saw is a standard professional STIHL chainsaw, identical for every competitor, with two precise cuts to be made into the same log. The hot saw is the same idea except the chainsaw is a hand-built modified engine on a chainsaw bar, loud enough to be heard from the next paddock, capable of three cuts through a log in a handful of seconds.
The Stihl Timbersports Series, founded in the United States in 1985 and now run from Germany, takes those six disciplines, scores them with a points system that rewards both the win and the gap to the next competitor, and runs them as a national championship in each member country. The national winners then meet at a single televised world final at the end of each season, all six disciplines on the same evening, head-to-head, in front of a stadium crowd. The format is closer to a decathlon than a single race. To win it you have to be near the top of the world in everything.
Wynyard, between 1997 and 2017, was near the top of the world in everything, almost without break, for two decades.
The first run
The first Stihl Timbersports world series title came in 1997. Wynyard was 23 and had just turned full-time professional. He won again in 1998, again in 1999, and again in 2000. Four in a row. There has been almost nothing in the sport, before or since, like the four-year run of a young New Zealander arriving on the international circuit and reducing every existing world champion to second place.
The scoring format rewarded the athlete with no weak event, and Wynyard had none. He was strongest in the standing block and dangerous in everything else, and the points table did the rest. The Otago Daily Times reported his own view of why he kept winning, which was that size is not everything in chopping. Technique is.
He was also, in the personal idiom of his sport, a cross-handed chopper. He was right-hand-dominant but chopped left-handed, because chopping that way let his dominant right hand guide the axe. It looked unusual. He kept doing it. He won.
David Bolstad took the series in 2001, and Wynyard took it back in 2002. Through the middle of the decade the title moved between the two of them and the rest of the world’s best, Bolstad collecting his five series championships between 2001 and 2008, Wynyard adding another in 2006 before winning four straight from 2009 to 2012. Australia’s Brad De Losa took the title in 2013. Wynyard answered with four more in a row, 2014 to 2017, and finished on fourteen.
Karmyn and the Jack and Jill
On the New Zealand circuit Jason Wynyard met Karmyn, a champion sawyer in her own right. They married, and they sawed together.
The Jack and Jill is the doubles event of competitive sawing, a two-person crosscut event in which a man and a woman pull a single double-handled saw through a log together, the cut counted only when the saw clears the underside of the log cleanly. The rhythm has to be locked. If either pulls too hard the saw binds. If either lets up the saw stops. At world-record level it is something only people who train together for years can do quickly.
Jason and Karmyn Wynyard won the Jack and Jill world title together at the Lumberjack World Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin. Of everything he achieved in the sport, he rated that one above all of it. “Winning the ‘Jack and Jill’ competition and breaking the record with my wife Karmyn in 2006,” Jason said when the Herald asked him in 2009 for his proudest sporting moment, “it’s something special when you get to compete with your wife in a World Championship and to win it and break the record was pretty amazing.”
The death of David Bolstad
On Saturday 19 November 2011, David Bolstad was competing at the Waiuku Cosmopolitan Axemen’s Club championships in south Auckland, the kind of small rural fixture both men had been chopping at since childhood. He finished his final event at about five o’clock. As his mother Robin later recounted, he shouldered his axe box, felt pins and needles down his arm, collapsed and died. He was 42. His seven-year-old son Morgan was at the event.
The two of them had chopped for New Zealand together for fifteen years. Wynyard was 38 himself that summer, and had pushed his body harder, for longer, than almost anyone in the sport. He kept chopping. The nine series titles he held at the time of David’s death became fourteen, the last of them in 2017.
Injury and comeback
Woodchopping at the elite level is hard on joints. The standing block puts the entire weight of a 130-kilogram athlete repeatedly through one hip, then the other, then the first again, while a sharp piece of steel travels at the speed of a fastball into a block of wood in front of his pelvis. Most champions in the discipline, by their late thirties, are managing chronic damage.
Wynyard tore his shoulder badly just before a US tour in the mid-2000s. He recovered and went back. “I tore my shoulder about five years ago at a crucial time just before I was heading off to the USA,” he said in 2009. “And that being the main income for me it was really tough.” Later came arthritis, a course of stem-cell treatment in an attempt to delay surgery, and finally a full hip replacement.
He came back in 2022. RNZ ran a feature that year on his return. He was 48, chopping on a replaced hip, and chasing a record tenth individual world title. He flew to Gothenburg, Sweden, for the world final on 29 and 30 October 2022 and finished off the podium, in a final won by Australia’s Brad De Losa. Alongside him in the New Zealand contingent was an 18-year-old making his debut for the country. It was Morgan Bolstad, David’s son, the boy who had been at Waiuku at seven, now chopping next to the man his father had chased for a decade.
May to October 2023
In May 2023 Jason Wynyard was diagnosed with stage four Burkitt lymphoma, one of the fastest-growing of all human cancers. He began the strongest chemotherapy protocol available. It failed. On 18 August 2023 he was told he had weeks to live.
He pursued hyperbaric oxygen and natural therapies, and spent his final weeks at home in Auckland. He died there at 2.20am on 4 October 2023. His family’s statement, reported by the NZ Herald, said he passed away “holding the hand of his beloved partner Sharon Kennerley”. He was 49, a few weeks short of 50.
Stihl Timbersports’ international tribute called him “a true legend, an inspiring and humble athlete”. Willie Jackson, the Minister for Māori Development at the time, in the Beehive’s poroporoaki, called him “a true ambassador for the sport”. Contemporaries had long described him as an icon and the Michael Jordan of wood chopping, and the line was repeated in the tributes.
What survives
The cold ledger is easier to set down than the warm one. Fourteen Stihl Timbersports world series titles. Nine individual world championships. More than 230 titles around the world. Sixteen All-Around Champion titles at the Lumberjack World Championships. World records in the standing block, the 350mm underhand in 1994, and the single buck at 9.39 seconds in 2007. A double buck world record of 4.77 seconds set with Dion Lane in 2005. A Jack and Jill world title alongside Karmyn, the win he rated above all the rest. An MNZM in the 2017 New Year Honours. And in 2014, a piece of history shared with his eldest boy, when Jason and Tai Wynyard became the first father and son to jointly receive the Albie Pryor Memorial Māori Sports Person of the Year award.
The harder thing to put on a scoreboard is what he did for the sport itself. New Zealand woodchopping had been declining as a community pastime since the 1970s, as the rural workforce that produced its competitors thinned out. Most rural New Zealanders no longer had to chop their own firewood, much less learn to do it elegantly, and by the 2010s it was carried by a smaller circle of dedicated families, still drawing the crowd at every A and P show.
Wynyard’s run of world titles, on Stihl’s televised world finals in cities like Gothenburg and Stuttgart, kept the sport visible in New Zealand for an entire generation that might otherwise have lost interest in it. He gave the country, on television, a sport in which we were not just plucky participants but the dominant force, year after year, against a field of Australians, Americans, Canadians and Europeans.
He is survived by his three children, sons Tai and Tautoko and daughter Moananui. Tai took the family’s size and athleticism into basketball, becoming the youngest ever Tall Black in 2014 at just 16 and going on to play for the University of Kentucky from 2016 to 2018. And the other great chopping surname carries on beside the Wynyard story, with Morgan Bolstad now wearing the New Zealand colours his father and grandfather wore.
Jason Wynyard was, in the long view, a boy from the Bay of Islands who inherited from his father a craft most New Zealanders had stopped noticing, who brought to it an unusual combination of physical size, fine motor control and calm temperament, and who was ready when a German chainsaw company turned the show-ring axe contest into a televised world series. Out of that he built something nobody in the sport, in any country, had ever built before. Fourteen world series titles. Two decades at the top. A world record set on a two-handled saw with his wife.
It is, on the long view, a very specifically New Zealand way to be the best in the world. You go to the local A and P show with your dad, you get given an axe at six, and twenty years later, in a stadium in Sweden, you are still winning.
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia, Jason Wynyard and David Bolstad
- NZ Geographic, Block busters (the long feature on contemporary New Zealand woodchopping)
- NZ Edge, Mourning the passing of lumberjack icon Jason Wynyard
- NZ Herald, Kiwi wood-chopping great Jason Wynyard dies after battle with aggressive cancer
- NZ Herald, My life in sport: Jason Wynyard
- RNZ, Axeman Jason Wynyard takes swing at record 10th world title
- Otago Daily Times, World champion axe man
- Beehive.govt.nz, Poroporoaki: Jason Wynyard
- Stihl Timbersports, The six disciplines
More from the Great New Zealanders series
This is part of Newswire’s Great New Zealanders series, which profiles people whose lives shaped this country. Other recent profiles include Bruce McLaren, the Auckland boy who built a Formula One team, Jean Batten, the New Zealand aviator whose records survived her disappearance and Jack Lovelock, the Timaru miler who ran the most beautiful race in Berlin.
Have something to add
Did you watch Jason Wynyard chop on a Saturday afternoon at Mamaku or Helensville or Sydney’s Royal Easter Show? Did you compete against him, with him, or behind him? Did your father or grandfather chop in the Sonny Bolstad and Pae Wynyard generation? Did you see the October 2022 Gothenburg final on television? We would love to hear from you in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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