Brad De Losa in training at his South Bownfels base shortly before leaving for Italy.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Brad De Losa is off to the physio. The 46-year-old is driving the 90 minutes from his home in Lithgow to Penrith for some acupuncture and light massage. The treatment is “just a little bit of a tweak before I head off to Europe”. If you had never before laid eyes on De Losa, these snippets of information leave quite a bit to the imagination.
Once you learn his destination is Milan, the scope of possibilities seems to narrow. But then you remember it is the wrong month for fashion week, and that De Losa’s checked baggage will feature fewer Versace numbers than it will genuinely enormous saws. And some axes. Some of which he has named.
Then you see De Losa, and he is almost as tall as those two-metre stock saws he’ll be travelling with. He’s a big unit, too. Just the kind of body type one might deduce would be capable of chopping and sawing through tree trunks in world-record times. Yes, the fitter and father of two is also a Stihl Timbersports world champion – twice.
But when he represents Australia in Italy this weekend, he does not just have a chance at winning a fourth World Trophy because he has the physical attributes – and physio sessions – befitting a world-class woodchopper. De Losa is so much more than a lumberjack; this quietly spoken Australian is a wood whisperer. A reader of timber. A linguist in lumber.
And he has to be because, unlike many of his rivals, he is a first-generation woodchopper and did not have the tricks of the trade passed down to him through generations. Everything he knows, he learned on the fly. And there is much more to the sport than meets the naked eye. The art lies not only in strength and technique, but also in examining the type of wood and selecting the right piece of equipment for the job. Different saws cut faster through different types of wood. Axes are ground with particular species in mind.
“And we don’t get to pick the log we cut,” De Losa says. “All the logs we cut for a certain event will come out of one tree, then they’re put into a lathe and turned down to the same diameter. But you do get a bit of variance. The bottom of the tree has a little bit more taken off it than what the top of the tree does. In some woods, the wood from the bottom will cut better, and in others the wood from the top of the tree will cut better.
Brad De Losa with one of his giant saws.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
“It just depends which wood you’re actually cutting, but that’s luck of the draw. So they’ll just call my name out, I put my hand in, and if I draw out number three, I’ve got to cut block number three. And if you do get a limb, sometimes inside you’ll get a little knot or a defect in the timber.”
Wood in Australia, such as eucalypt, is generally the hardest. Most in the United States and Canada is white pine. In Europe, De Losa will be dealing with softer poplar that is “a lot quicker and a lot snappier”. “That’s when the transitions, and where you place your equipment and how you pick it up, can also save a lot of time.”
These are the more technical elements of a sport with more to it than most casual Sydney Royal Easter Show spectators would even consider. Training is another. At the World Trophy, for example, De Losa and 15 other of the world’s highest-ranked athletes will go head-to-head in a series of knockout match-ups featuring four back-to-back disciplines: the stock saw, underhand chop, single buck and standing block chop.
In other words, the stereotypical paunch is a thing of the past, as athletes refine their physiques in line with modern sports science. In recent years, De Losa has traded heavy weights for Tabata – a style of high-intensity interval training – and swimming between cutting logs. The quick transitions from one discipline to the next also requires fast engagement of different muscle groups.
The Coffey family at the Melbourne Show about 10 years ago: From back is dad David, mum Susie, Matt and his siblings Makayla, Mitchell and Michael.
Stihl, the German chainsaw and power equipment manufacturer, started running “the original extreme sport” in 1985. In the four decades since, it has grown a cult following. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Timbersports is a big deal in the US, where the crowds are boisterous and the TV viewers number in the millions.
The men’s professional series, which also includes the hot saw and springboard disciplines, involves racing with 30kg chainsaws made using repurposed motorcycle or snowmobile engines. De Losa, who began woodchopping in Australia aged 16, first competed in Timbersports in his early 20s.
“I went to a show and actually just hired the saw off another competitor for the day,” he says. “He said ‘there’s the motor, there’s the pipe and there’s the bar and chain – work out how to put it all together and start it’. Lucky I have a mechanical engineering background, so figured out how to put all that together. But as far as holding a motorcycle engine in your hands and revving it with a chain going really fast, it’s quite daunting to start with.”
The transition was a little less taxing for Matt Coffey, who has been axing logs in half since he was 11 years old. The 22-year-old from Ballarat is the son of David and Susie Coffey, two Australian representative woodchoppers who taught him the ropes. “I can remember me first go,” Coffey says. “It was in the backyard, in the shed. Just set the log up, away you go. Just making sure everything’s right, straight up and down and everything like that.
Grafton athlete Chris Owen holding a 30kg chainsaw in the 2020 Virtual Australian championships.Credit: Wolter Peeters
“For safety we wear chain mail socks, which is basically butcher’s gloves made up into socks. And then you’ve got your shin guards. I was wearing them at the time and I’ve been wearing them all the way through.”
Coffey has qualified for the Rookie World Championship by winning the 2023 Australian Rookie Championships in Wollongong. Last year he travelled to Stuttgart in a supporting role for the Chopperoos, who claimed an unprecedented fourth consecutive world championship. On the team was De Losa and also Coffey’s mentor, Laurence O’Toole, who helped him hone his technique.
David, who won a world title in 2011 and is the brother of another champion woodchopper in John Coffey, says his son starting showing an interest in the sport from the age of five.
Matt Coffey at the Sydney Show in 2023.
“You start by trying to teach him to actually hit true,” David says. “So they basically start with just an axe handle and learn to pick up an axe directly in front of them, not out to the side. Once they get that mastered, then you teach them how to turn their feet and where their hips should go. Once they perfect that, you move on to the next part. Matthew has been very easy to teach.
“It’s very technical, and there are a lot of different woodchoppers: people who just go flat out and hit hard and fast, and attack it; then there’s other people like Matthew. Matthew’s not a very big kid – he’s only 90 kilos ringing wet – and he’s going up against kids 120-130kg. Everyone says weight shifts wood, which is true, but so can a bloke who can hit with timing. It’s like golf. You can be the biggest bloke out there and not hit a golf ball 10 feet if you don’t have the timing. Woodchopping is very much the same.”
Coffey, who is working as a farmer and concreter in the Victorian town of Navarre, supplements his log training by playing footy and going to the gym. He goes through “a fair bit” of wood – “I struggle to try and keep it in the yard sometimes”. And despite his relative youth, he knows all the old-time loggers and respects the sport’s royalty. Without prompting, he names O’Toole (senior and junior) and Bruce Winkle and the Jason Wynyard.
Wynyard, a Kiwi nine-time world champion, died late last year from cancer. He was 49 – only marginally older than stock saw Czech Martin Komarek, who was killed in a tree accident aged 45 in 2022. Both still hold world records, and De Losa was close friends with both of them.
The late New Zealander Jason Wynyard in action during his younger days.Credit: Ken James
“Jason was probably my biggest rival,” says De Losa, who says American Matt Cogar and Kiwi Jack Jordan will now be the toughest to beat. “I cut second and third to Jason on quite a few occasions in Europe over the years.” The most memorable time De Losa did beat Wynyard was his first world championship in 2013 (he won his second in 2022). He did so with his favourite axe, which he named Lloydy.
“He was an old guy who used to help me quite a lot when I was younger,” he says. “He wasn’t involved in Timbersports, but used to help me prepare the axes – polish them, do a lot of stone work and take all the grind marks out. He used to come away with me to a lot of competitions, but he has passed away as well.
“Another axe I called Gobbler. I won a big memorial chop with it for another guy who used to help up at Brunswick Heads. His nickname was Gobbler, so I called that axe Gobbler. So just little significant things like that that.”
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