Chestnut Championship in England Is Roiled by Accusation of Cheating

Known as conkers in Britain, chestnuts are played in an annual championship there. This year, there are accusations of cheating. And it’s all very serious.

Buckle up, because a cheating scandal is roiling England. The accusations revolve around a winner of the World Conker Championships, and if he used a metal conker to defeat his opponents’ conkers.

If you’re not a resident of the British Isles, you might be a little confused by that sentence.

A conker is a chestnut that falls from trees and can be found all over Britain and Ireland in the fall. (For the sake of simplicity we will be using the English term throughout this story, so this is the last time you’ll be seeing the word chestnut.)

The competition, also known as conkers, goes like this: Holes are drilled through the conkers, and strings are threaded through each one, with one conker on a string for each competitor. Two opponents face off, with the goal of destroying the other person’s conker with your own by whipping one against the other. Last person standing with an intact conker wins.

Children in Britain play the game in playgrounds and parks in the fall. And once a year, several hundred adults gather for the World Conker Championships in the tiny English village of Southwick, which has about 160 residents. This year, the competition drew 256 contestants and about 2,500 spectators, said Charles Whalley, one of the championships’ committee members.

But this year, the men’s competition has become embroiled in controversy. The title on Sunday went to David Jakins, 82, who won for the first time after many decades of taking part in the annual tradition.

After the tournament, however, Alastair Johnson-Ferguson, the runner-up in the men’s tournament, claimed that Mr. Jakins had broken the rules en route to winning the trophy by using a steel conker.

Mr. Johnson-Ferguson, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, told the British newspaper The Telegraph that his conker had “disintegrated in one hit” after being struck by Mr. Jakins’s.

“And that just doesn’t happen,” he added.

Indeed, a painted steel conker was found in Mr. Jakins’s pocket after the tournament.

But he vehemently denied the cheating accusations to the British news media, saying he carried the steel conker because he thought it would be humorous. When reached by phone on Tuesday, he said he was “not prepared to comment on any of that,” referring to the accusations.

Organizers of the event said they were investigating by examining photos and videos taken by spectators during the event, but said so far they had no reason to believe Mr. Jakins cheated by using the steel conker.

“We’re in the middle of a bit of a scandal,” Mr. Whalley said in an interview on Tuesday. “So far our investigation is showing that nothing untoward happened.”

Mr. Jakins praised the winner of the women’s competition — Kelci Banschbach, the first American to win a conkers championship — and said he liked participating partly because the event aims to raise money for charity.

“It’s something to do for conkers season,” he said.

The story quickly spread through British — and some international — news media on Tuesday, a welcome reprieve from hard news and more consequential investigations. Newspapers dryly published alliterative headlines, with a mock seriousness that was, in true English fashion, nearly indistinguishable from serious news articles.

“You initially thought it was an open-shut case, didn’t you, that he was clearly innocent, but now you are going to have to go back and have an action replay,” Kay Burley, an anchor at Sky News, said during an interview with one of the organizers, with a furrowed brow.

Ms. Banschbach, the American winner of the women’s tournament, said she had decided at the last minute to take part in the competition, which she called “very quintessentially British.”

“I don’t want to say it’s ridiculous, but it kind of is,” she said in a phone interview. But, she added, the championship still drew people from all over the world.

Ms. Banschbach said she had heard only snippets about the cheating scandal because she had been at work all day.

“I honestly have no idea, that seems kind of crazy,” she said. “It’s a very wholesome event.”

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