Happy Friday, everyone! This weekend the Great Northwest Oktoberfest in Whitefish will wrap up, but before the last beverage is poured and the final polka note has faded, a couple of new steinholding champions will be anointed.
As I wrote in a preview of the festival, this year’s lineup of steinholding competitions was intended to set the stage for the event’s first Montana State Steinholding Championship.
In addition to men’s and women’s champions from the Whitefish festival taking the stage on the final night, there will be winners from other steinholding competitions in the state in Missoula and Helena joining them for one final 406 showdown. The winners will have their travel fees reimbursed for the U.S. Steinholding Association’s national championship next month in Cincinnati.
Of course, all eyes are on Dave Sturzen, a Kalispell x-ray technician who is the Flathead Valley’s most decorated steinholder, and in recent years has won major competitions, and even defeated a World’s Strongest Man winner.
And Sturzen is on a bit of a tear lately. Last weekend he competed at Germanfest in Missoula, where he held a full stein of beer aloft for 27 minutes and eight seconds. That would be good enough for a new record, but the U.S. Steinholding association only deems state championships, national championships and wild card competitions as events eligible for record setting.
That could mean big things for Sturzen this Saturday, when the Great Northwest Oktoberfest hosts its first Montana state championship. The U.S. Steinholding Association’s all-time longest hold is currently listed at 23 minutes and 40 seconds. That feat of strength and endurance is credited to competitor Cody Bane.
Sturzen is the successor to legendary Flathead steinholder Kevin Collom, who passed away in 2022 (both men are pictured in the featured image above, while Sturzen appears in the photograph below). Former Flathead Beacon staff writer Andy Viano chronicled Sturzen’s challenge to Collom’s seven-year reign as the Great Northwest Oktoberfest champion in the classic 2021 piece “Next in Stein.”
It’s one of my favorite stories from the Beacon archives (while I’m getting nostalgic, I recommend checking out Molly Priddy’s 2017 story “Sundays with Polar Bear Rick”), and it contains the wonderful description of Collom as “a 57-year-old Whitefish plasterer who trains with a stein full of loose nuts and bolts topped with a few glugs of motor oil,” and who Viano wrote “is as close to a celebrity as can possibly exist in Northwest Montana steinholding.”
Taking down Sturzen would be no small task for any challenger, but you never know. Sturzen’s defeat of Collom in 2019 was unexpected, and reportedly hinged on a drop of beer from Collom’s stein hitting the ground. It just goes to show that one can only achieve so much certainty in the results of a competition measured in minutes, seconds and drops of beer.
The Montana State Steinholding Championships at the Great Northwest Oktobefest in Whitefish are scheduled for this Saturday at 9 p.m. By 9:30 p.m., the Europa Band is expected to be back on stage and playing music as the festival winds down with last call at 10:30 p.m. and the festival’s end at 11 p.m. For more information go to https://www.whitefishoktoberfest.com/.
I’m Mike Kordenbrock, bringing you the Daily Roundup…
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