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World Pea Shooting Championship 2026 -

There are many ways to spend a Saturday. You could climb a mountain, run a marathon or queue patiently at a garden centre café for a scone the size of a paving slab. Or, if you happen to find yourself in the Cambridgeshire village of Witcham, you could join competitors from across the country in pursuit of perhaps Britain's most delightfully improbable sporting prize: the World Pea Shooting Championship. Now in its fifth decade, the championship has been bringing together the nation's finest exponents of precision pea propulsion since 1971. It is exactly what it sounds like, which is one of its greatest charms. The objective is disarmingly straightforward. Standing twelve feet from a target about the size of a small dinner plate, competitors fire five dried peas through a pea shooter at a dartboard-style target covered in sticky wet putty. Hit the bullseye, and you earn five points. Land in the middle ring, and it's worth three. Catch the outer edge, and you collect one. Miss altogether, and your pea joins countless others in a quiet life of disappointment on the floor. It looks absurdly easy until you try it. Then you discover that sending a shrivelled pea accurately across twelve feet with nothing more than a measured puff of air requires a surprising amount of concentration, impeccable timing, and lungs that refuse to be distracted by the audience. The competition begins with a qualifying round in which everyone fires five shots, the sixteen highest scorers earning a place in the knockout stages. Some competitors favour the machine-gun approach, loading all five peas into the shooter and dispatching them in rapid succession. Once the head-to-head rounds begin, however, it's a slower, more tactical affair, with rivals taking alternate shots while trying not to betray the slightest hint of nerves. There are two divisions. The Traditional class insists on ordinary plastic pea shooters with no modifications whatsoever, proving that sporting purity is alive and well. The Open class, by contrast, embraces modern ingenuity, where customised pea shooters complete with laser sights demonstrate that even pea shooting has found room for technological advancement. Michelle Berry, already a four-time champion, once again displayed remarkable accuracy to win the Open title and further enhance a reputation that makes her something of a legend in the rather specialised world of competitive pea shooting. Meanwhile, the Traditional final saw 40-year-old Paul Gipp out-puff defending champion Robbie Nicholls after a closely fought contest that was every bit as tense as its far grander sporting counterparts, despite involving considerably fewer television cameras and substantially more dried legumes. Like so many wonderfully eccentric British traditions, the World Pea Shooting Championship manages to be both faintly ridiculous and completely serious at exactly the same time. And perhaps that's its greatest achievement. It reminds us that you don't need multimillion-pound stadiums or global television audiences to create genuine sporting drama. Sometimes all it takes is a village hall, a handful of dried peas, and the determination to prove that, for one glorious afternoon, nobody in the world can puff quite as accurately as you.