Turf Bonanza 2025Edinburgh, 6-9 June
ESOC hosted the 2025 Turf Bonanza! This was the first Turf Bonanza to be held in Scotland, and the first Bonanza outside of Sweden. It was a great success, in a format similar to the previous SCOnanza events - a busy weekend of events and socials, with many international competitors.
Report by ESOCWalter:
The Bonanza is THE event in the Turf calendar, and so when we were asked to host it this year we jumped at the chance! This was the first time that the Bonanza had been held outside of Sweden and we were excited that so many from Sweden chose to travel over to Edinburgh for it. In total we had 170 participants, with roughly half from Sweden, a couple from Finland, half a dozen from England and the remainder Scots. A huge thanks to everyone who joined us for the fun-packed weekend!
The festival of Turfing kicked off on Friday 6 June with a Welcome event based from the Cold Town House pub in the Grassmarket. The planner was granitemike and he comments:
“With over 120 registered, and determined to make sure nobody was too far from the pub at the end, zones were placed all over Edinburgh’s historic district. The naming theme for the zones was Scottish Lochs. So as participants walked or ran between Loch Venacher and Long Long, from Loch Callater to Loch Tay - those not local to Edinburgh were able to take in the sights and sounds, ahead of the main events on Saturday. Rumour has it many Tourists on Edinburgh’s royal mile were left puzzled by participants running and stopping, running and stopping from the castle down the famous street.”
Results from the Welcome Event are available on the BonanzaWel event page of the Turf website.
The Friday evening was a great chance to meet up with Turfing friends old and new, and to collect welcome packs, containing cans of Irn Bru, Scottish tablet, an exclusive “Bonanza 25” pin badge, stickers, postcards and final details.
On Saturday, the action shifted to the Bruntsfield area of the city, with the event centre at McLaren’s on the Corner. Saturday saw the main Bonanza championship events, with the bike first, followed by the foot – both being two hour events.
The planner for the Bike Bonanza was féarglas, who comments:
“Within minutes of the reveal in Enköping that Bonanza 2025 was going to Edinburgh, kjtindall said the planner ought to be féarglas, for her ‘attention to detail’ he said. Hmm. And so it was. I immediately knew which area I preferred - West Edinburgh around Murrayfield/Stenhouse - a new area from previous Scottish Opens, and flat, with quieter residential streets and some cycle paths. However, Billy Joel had a similar idea, announcing a concert at Murrayfield Stadium on Bonanza day. Cheeky! With the expected crowds and road closures, we relocated the event centre and the event area. Billy subsequently cancelled the concert, but I decided to link the new event centre to as much as possible of the preferred original area.
While making the event planning more challenging, requiring crossing rail tracks and busy main roads, I felt it would provide the better event and create distinct areas. With a theme of bicycle parts for the zone names, and none were made up,169 zones were set. My objective when setting event zones is to provide choice and challenge; choice - each zone having at least four distinct ways to approach and leave, with a large zone area, and dense enough to give multiple pathways; and challenge - being aware and making choices when others can move quickly and randomly from all sides and levels between the zones.
It was a dry start with just a few light showers in the first hour, with the heaviest rain holding off until the final 30 minutes. The western area was very busy as expected, flat and dense, with plenty of movement by all between the zones, but PPH difficult to hold. In the eastern area, a happy accident he says due to a last minute arrival at the nearby event centre after sleeping late, MaXi was often alone. He established a solid lead with takes and high PPH, and held this lead to the finish with the highest number of takes at 99. MrJokerit and Hodge, neck and neck on points, danced a few loops together in a middle area to the sounds of ‘MrAce to the west of me, MaXi to the east, here I am stuck in the middle with you’
Exciting Turf-TV ensued for a hotly contested event right up to the final takes. As many soggy Turfers returned to McLaren’s, MaXi had taken the gold with 1803 points, MrAce the silver with 1671 points, Hodge the bronze with 1652 points, MrJokerit 4th place with 1645 points, and steventon_gang 5th place with 1636 points. Just 16 points between 3rd and 5th. AnnSch finished as top female in 23rd with 1245 points - a category worthy of a prize at future Bonanzas. There was one casualty to the rain - the deadly screen flicker - making a Saturday afternoon priority for MrJokerit to purchase a new phone when his screen could not be replaced in time for the 24hr event the next day. Scottish Rain 1 - Phone Screen 0!”
Results for the Bike Bonanza are on the BonanzaBike event page of the Turf website.
By half way through that event, we had successfully hooked up the live Turf TV onto a TV at McLaren’s and were then ready again for battle commencing in the Foot Bonanza at 1.30pm. Planner CSL comments:
“Last September we found out that Edinburgh would be hosting the Turf Bonanza in 2025. My first thought was, “That’s great: I can get a Bonanza medal without leaving Edinburgh.” I didn’t know who, apart from ESOCWalter, would be organising the event. A couple of months later, kjtindall asked if I would plan the Bonanza Foot event and I thought, “Why not?” I didn’t think much more until April, when I decided to copy an earlier event that I had planned, and expand from there. The original hub was to be around Murrayfield, but then a big concert was announced at Murrayfield on the Saturday, so Holy Corner was chosen instead.
In the end, the event area stretched from Hunter’s Bog on Arthur’s Seat in the east to Harrison Park in the west, and from George Street in the north to the southern railway. The event I copied had 120 zones, suitable for 40 people. I moved some of them and renamed others and waited to see how many people would enter. In May, there were 75, so I made some more zones to fill in gaps. Eventually, we had more than 100 entries and I ended up with 322 zones. Southern Edinburgh has few suitable places for zones. I tried to have them in reasonable places and all but two had people visiting them during the event. Old College (part of Edinburgh University) was locked, although it’s usually accessible on a Saturday, and the other zone that no-one visited was on the way out from Waverley Station to Calton Road; I guess people couldn’t figure out how to get there. The hardest part of the planning was thinking of unique names for the zones. I had names from obvious features in the zone, Scots words or phrases, or my prejudices. Hope everyone enjoyed it; it seemed to go well and luckily the weather was pretty good.
Results for the Foot Bonanza are on the BonanzaFoot event page of the Turf website.
In the evening, we hosted the Bonanza Banquet at Pizza Express in Morningside, where we could have done with a microphone, a TV (for the reveal of Bonanza 2026 in Gothenburg) and also more pizza coming out faster … Prizes were presented for the championships and it was a chance to rehydrate over some drinks as well. The biggest ever UK crowdy was achieved with the 89 medal being triggered for many!
On Sunday morning, the Crazy Closing event took place in the Meadows area and Bruntsfield Links. This involved “crazy” zone shapes and was a lot of fun to plan! After two years of Crazy Closing events at the Scottish Open Turf Champs (SCOnanza), I like to think I am getting slightly better at making the zones weird, tiny, massive, confusing and/or unusual! Some of the zones were deliberately as small as I could make them, which I know is annoying but also part of the fun?! There were zones spelling out BONANZA, a Scottish flag, many zig-zags and also dart board available. The zones were all named after words for “crazy” in English, Swedish, Finnish and various other languages, so included “OFFROCKER!”, “CRACKPOT!”, “VANSINNIG!” and “TUBEL!”. To add to the crazy vibe, there was a “Wacko Taco” on the loose in the shape of kjtindall, and if you caught him then you got an extra 100 points added to your total.
The event results (without the Wacko Taco points) are on the BonanzaCrazy event page of the Turf website.
As if this wasn’t quite enough fun for one weekend, we then launched into the 24 hour event. This was the first 24 hour event ever to be held outside of Sweden, but it won’t be the last. It was massively fun and had a great friendly feeling throughout, The planner for the 24 hour event was again féarglas, who had the original vision for it and put in a huge amount of effort to make it such a success (with help from Artful and Lightinkorean). féarglas comments:
“From a casual comment in a casual conversation back in September 2024, the seed was planted to hold a 24hr event in Edinburgh at Bonanza 2025. It would certainly be an opportunity for Turfers to attain the Event 24 medal while already gathered for Bonanza 2025, and a good one for UK-based Turfers, in their home country. From these seeds forwards, if the devil is in the detail, there were many devils every step of the way!
With the rules established after many a question, and with inclusion in mind, people could choose between classifications of individual and team, and either foot or bike, with mixed mode teams allowed. I created two separate events running concurrently, one for the foot Turfers and one for the bike Turfers. Each event had their own zones and event areas, with name prefixes of F24 or B24 which many found helpful to help distinguish which event other avatars were part of. Another time though, I would avoid the very busy High Street, and the cobbled streets for the bikes, if possible in Edinburgh.
We started at midday from the Canopy after the Crazy Closing event. We moved to The Pear Tree for the evening, which was a pleasant gathering place with a table piled high with tech charging under the giant lights of 24HR. People came and went like in an Irish kitchen, before we moved to PureGym Quartermile overnight like a group of tired homeless Turfers lying on mats in the stretching area, and then back to the EFI at 8am. There were some blips of phones not charging, lights dying, home alarms going off, a puncture, and an app connection issue, but the show went on.
From the outset, ><)))*> was the clear winner in the individual foot event, with his mammoth walking of 70km (warded km) with few breaks, through Arthurs Seat and all over. ZulaTheAlien:) and Lightinkorean fought for 2nd place until the closing hours, but Zula was too strong to be caught, and Lightinkorean took 3rd place.
A truly 24hr battle was fought out in the individual bike event, with nothing much between the top 4/5 at any time and with no let-up right to the end. recycling led for many hours until MrJokerit took the lead at 6am, no doubt glad of his new phone replacing the one rain damaged in the Bonanza bike event. He took 1st place after covering 240km (warded km) and 910 takes. recycling held on for 2nd place, with TeaCup2.1/Cambla taking 3rd place, Fashven 4th and mrcoolwhat 5th. With no equity between the teams in their make-up, prizes were awarded instead to the strongest foot and bike members. FeTaTo left no-one in doubt with her win as strongest foot team member, with TheLovely in 2nd. In the bike category, magnusn passed his teammate Kygni to take 1st place, leaving Kygni in 2nd place.
For me, the highlight was the supportive camaraderie between all participants, with a wave and a cheer as we passed each other turfing, with encouragement and help for each other in getting over the finish line. We may have looked like broken soldiers returning from the war, but we did it together =)
“Have you taken your hourly zone?”
Results for the 24 hour event are on the Turf website:
Bike event: Edi24hrBike event page
Foot event: Edi24hrFoot event page
And after a prizegiving in Canopy, that was a wrap on this year’s Bonanza! Or was it a Wacko Taco!?
Big thanks to everyone involved in the organising team: féarglas, CSL, granitemike, Hodge, ZulaTheAlien:), kjtindall, DNostrebor, dianavilliers, Lightinkorean and Artful. It was brilliant for us all to see the event come together and to welcome so many happy Turfers to Edinburgh.
Next year’s SCOnanza is provisionally in Glasgow in June! More details to follow and we very much hope to see a big crowd(y) at that too!
- ESOCWalter
Full details about the Bonanza weekend are here: FINAL BONANZA DETAILK
See this document for a description of how a Turf event works: Participating in a Turf event
Other entries categorised under: Turf