I am sitting on a dock in the Wisconsin sun. About 15 feet away, Livi Pappadopoulos and Aini Anderson are walking on water. The first and (now) second-ranked women in logrolling are sharing a No. 3 log (13 inches in diameter, No. 3 because it is third-widest) and a full conversation. "Can I flex for a second?" Livi asks. Aini says sure. "The other day I came out here alone and got a little roll in on the No. 5, probably half an hour, and then brought it back to the dock and pulled it up onto the dock all without getting wet." Though the No. 5 is the smallest, not even used by pros in competition, it would still be about 270 pounds (when dry), round, and in the situation Livi is describing, also wet and slippery. None of that seems remotely possible. It does not even occur to me to doubt her.
I got into logrolling the same way everyone does: I was hanging out in the Midwest looking for a way to kill a Saturday. On this particular weekend, the La Crosse Open was happening, so I just showed up. It was a pretty low-key, casual affair. The spectators were mostly locals who knew someone in the event, or people who didn't really know what they were looking at but were quite happy to have a beer and a brat while watching something cool for free.
The magic of some sports is that you get to see someone do something that you know how to do, but way worse. I can hit a baseball, but I cannot hit a baseball so it sounds like this. But there are other sports where the magic is that the athletes are doing something well that I cannot do at all. Logrolling is one of these. If I tried to balance on a floating log, I would certainly drown. Actually, I would break entirely in half, then drown. Watch this:
So I sat there, munched on a stale hot dog, and watched this peculiar spectacle. The PA announcer used to roll, and she did a pretty great job of telling us what we were looking at, though she did flub just about every ad read. Matches were best two-out-of-three falls, with rollers starting on the biggest log allowed by their division and sizing down every two minutes if no falls occurred. The judges stop the match if the log floats too close to something solid, and they decide who fell first if both rollers fall.
Livi, along with being the six-time, reigning world champ, had not lost a match nor even a single fall in over three years. Aini (pronounced eye-knee) is Livi's regular training partner who has just graduated to the pro ranks. I missed Livi's first couple matches, but I caught nearly all of Aini's run to the finals. She has this perfect, impenetrable backpedal recovery any time someone gets her going the wrong way, which lets her get away with a lot of stuff that would probably be reckless for others to try. When you put up with how fucking good Livi is all week, I guess, nobody else can catch you off guard. In the finals, these two just went on forever, sizing down twice before the champ finally broke through for yet another flawless tournament. Aini happily took second, picking up a nice cash prize and a shitload of ranking points.
A few days later, my aunt and uncle and I went to have dinner with a friend of theirs. Their son is a logroller in the U13 division, and as with just about every kid in La Crosse who's into the sport, he trains with Livi at the local Y. I told them I was pretty fascinated by logrolling, so his mom gave me Livi's phone number. "She's very friendly, always interested in introducing new people to the sport." Indeed, Livi agreed to let me come watch her train the next Friday, which she said would be a lighter sort of day, because the following day would be the Midwest Championship in Madison. She would do an interview after.
To my surprise (and delight!), Livi is not training alone, but with Aini as well. I'm typically overdressed and more than a little nervous about my intrusion into their little corner of the world, but Aini immediately and excitedly launches into an explanation of the shoes they are wearing. In pro competitions, rollers wear soccer cleats modified for way more spikes, but for amateur competitions and practice, they don't want to tear up real wood logs, so they use carpet-covered or fully synthetic logs and wear barefoot-style trail running shoes. As a former parkour kid, I immediately recognize the shoe Aini is wearing as the Merrell Trail Glove 7. This makes me feel sort of competent, which gives me the confidence necessary to remove my boat shoes, roll up my corduroys, and wade out through the algae to join them on the dock.
Aini Anderson the logroller is a menace. Aini Anderson the person is a goofy ball of energy, still young enough that she specifies she is about to turn 17. Livi is already on the water, and she explains to me that the park is closing, so they need to throw all of their logs into the lagoon, because the water is not technically park property. Shane Burns, ranked fifth in the men's pro division, is there too, though he is just spectating, offering occasional mellow snark with a voice that wouldn't sound out of place hosting a prog-rock station. It is a gorgeous day, and the way these three know each other makes for delightful banter.
Injuries are a common theme: Livi is wearing a large watertight bandage on her knee to prevent a small gash from getting lake infections, though Aini laughs that she will get one anyway, as she apparently does every season. Aini is beat up, too—some guy in her gym class landed on her arm in some mishap, shattering it and requiring the insertion of a metal plate. It was fine for a while but is now giving her quite a bit of trouble. She's going to get it adjusted soon, but doesn't like that she won't be able to wrestle for a bit (she also does that). Shane took the opportunity to wisecrack about the rather impressive scar on Aini's arm from the plate's insertion.
They continue on like this: Shane chucks a piece of wood at Livi while she is rolling with her back turned, then blames Aini. Not to be outdone, Aini does the same and blames Shane. A little later the girls are rolling together, and Aini decides to glance at her watch. This gives Livi the opportunity to chuck her ass-over-teakettle into the water. These three seem to have a blast with each other, rarely a serious moment to be found.
After Shane left to play disc golf, I sat down to interview Livi. We talked for a long dang time about a billion different things, but for the sake of clarity and brevity, this has been edited.
Lucy: So how much strategy goes into [logrolling]?
Livi: A lot. There's a lot of strategy going into it. It's kind of like boxing. You can't touch your opponent, but in terms of jerking the log back and forth, out-enduring somebody, knowing your opponent's strengths and weaknesses, like some people are better [in one direction or the other], just knowing your opponent, knowing yourself, and your strengths, there's a lot that plays into it.
Lucy: I asked [aunt's friend's kid who trains with her] the same question and he said really you kind of just do whatever.
Livi: [laughing] That's the best.
Lucy: Like, "I just do whatever, I mean they do stuff and I just kind of react to that."
Livi: Yeah, we're going to have a conversation. I haven't taught him very well.
Lucy: It looked like Aini was really good going in reverse.
Livi: She is. And part of that is that she rolls with me a lot, and I'm better at my front step, having to combat that. She's a great recovery artist too—like she does a really great job adapting.
Lucy: So just walk us through some of the moves here.
Livi: Sure, so there are more prolonged sprints and then shorter kicks and pulls, jabbing at it to manipulate it as suddenly as you can.
Lucy: And I imagine there would be a good deal of timing to this?
Livi: Oh yeah, for sure. If you can catch it between somebody's strides, you can break their momentum pretty good. There are girls who are really skilled, but I know that their endurance isn't as strong as mine, so I will take like little jabs throughout the match to tire them out, because I don't want to go all out sprinting. They might be able to outsprint me, but they might not be able to outsprint me when they're really tired and I'm not.
Lucy: What does splashing do? What is the mechanic of that?
Livi: Getting water in your opponent's eyes. To be honest with you, I don't do it a lot, I'm just not that good at it. I try to do it once a season, just for fun. I'll do it against somebody I know I'm gonna beat, you know, just to say I did it, but I'm not the best at it.
Lucy: If you were out there on a log by yourself, do you think you could just go forever?
Livi: To an extent, yeah. My longest—this is on like a much bigger log, like bigger than is used in competition, and this was during COVID because I got really bored during COVID—I stayed on for three hours and three minutes, and I haven't done it since. It was really tough by the time I was done. I was like sick for a couple of days. But it was cool, and now I can always say that I did it, so maybe one day I'll go crazy and try for four hours.
Lucy: Dude. And what got you in the end?
Livi: Wind and tired. So what I used is called a Key Log [synthetic training log], which is like 65 pounds, and we took it with us on vacation out to South Dakota. So I swam it to the middle of the lake where we were staying at, and I [aimed] for three hours. That was my goal. And so I knew I was getting close. and the wind picked up. I was gonna be so mad, I just needed to get [pushed] back out. My dad ended up renting a kayak, which is like crazy, I still can't believe he did that, but he did.
Lucy: So you were out there during the attempt, like, "Dad rent a kayak and push me out?"
Livi: I asked him if he'd be willing to jump in, because it wasn't that deep and he swims. But instead he just went and got the kayak. I was like, "OK."
We don't know precisely who the first competitive logroller was, but a lot of games start the same way: Someone who feels pretty good going, "Gee, I wonder who's the best at this thing?" I feel this way about parallel parking.
The next day, in Madison, Livi took first again, and she would again a week later in the U.S. Open in Gladstone, Mich.—but not before suffering her first fall in over three years to Aini. "It was a really long match and she just caught me on a transition," Livi told me.
I don't think I'm overstating it when I say that this rivalry is the most interesting thing in either of their young careers. It seemed inevitable that these two would both make the finals at the mid-July Lumberjack World Championship in Heyward, Wis., and so it would be. Aini smoked everyone in the way of facing Livi, and on the third day of the event, it was exactly the pair you would hope for, rolling for all the marbles. After timing out on the first two logs, they decided it on the 12-inch No. 4 log.
Livi took the first fall in the best-of-five, basically just overpowering Aini's godlike recovery. That's what's supposed to happen—Aini's backstep, while incredibly effective against everyone else, just can't quite keep up with Livi accelerating to full speed when Aini is a little unbalanced. As was her right as the loser of the previous fall, Aini decided to switch sides of the log. The next fall was much stranger: It looked like Aini beat Livi clean, but the judges said they called a safety timeout.
Aini won the next fall and actually got a point this time, but it didn't seem like a clean defeat. The broadcasters said Livi may have gotten a cleat caught in a knot in the wood. It looked odd, like she forgot where the log was going to be. They switched sides again, and Livi won two in a row pretty dominantly, not seeming to mind when she switched back to the knot side of the log for what would be the final fall.
Livi won, but the gap between her and Aini feels smaller now, because Aini put her in the water again (arguably twice, though of course not officially). The challenge couldn't be coming at a more pivotal time in Livi's career. With her seventh world championship in a row, Livi tied for most consecutive championships with Escanaba, Michigan's own Dan McDonough. In case you were born yesterday under a rock, McDonough won from from '84 to '90, as well as '93 and '97. His nine total championships are the most on record.
McDonough was like this, too: helping everyone else and thereby making life harder for himself. He's still out there, running a small lumberjack promotion in Michigan. (McDonough wasn't just a logroller; apparently he was pretty decent at the all the different timber tortures.) Perhaps this is what one does in a sort of niche sport. If yoo(per) feel lonely at the top, simply create the competition yourself. It feels like a very Midwestern ethic. You make the challenge harder, because after all, do you really want to be called the best if you know the competition is weak?
