APTN launches new TV series featuring Indigenous arm wrestlers

By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY—APTN recently launched Arm Nation: the TV Series featuring more than a dozen Indigenous arm wrestling competitors, including Brenden Lemmon-Mulvihill and Natasha Batt from Ontario.

“There is more to arm wrestling than just arm wrestling,” says Lemmon-Mulvihill, an Algonquin arm wrestler from Pembroke. “There is an entertainment side of it and it seems there is going to be a way better future for the sport. That’s the best thing, to see more people becoming interested and to see more people coming in and learning and taking different parts of the sport in many different ways.”

Lemmon-Mulvihill, a provincial arm wrestling champion, began arm wrestling when he was growing up and later joined a local arm wrestling team.

“There are so many different styles of arm wrestling and people keep on just finding new ways to win,” Lemmon-Mulvihill says. “That’s the main idea is just to find a way to win, to beat somebody. You don’t necessarily have to be stronger than them, smarter or anything, but there is always just a way to win.”

The 13-episode half-hour series, which premiered on Oct. 20, follows the training, competitions and personal lives of the competitors.

“They picked a few weekends to follow me and my two kids around,” says Natasha Batt, an Anishinabe arm wrestler from Ottawa. “[They] basically documented the tournaments and our life too.”

Batt took up arm wrestling about two years ago after being invited by a friend to check out the sport at her garage, which was set up with about seven arm wrestling tables.

“Most matches are a few seconds long, if that,” Batt says. “Speed is important, technique is important, strength.”

Batt says her keys to arm wrestling are getting a good start, being focused and being ready.

“If you’re fast, that’s a bonus,” Batt says. “You don’t want to wait for your opponent to get better hand control over you.”

Batt says one of her longest matches took more than a minute from start to finish.

“So endurance can help if you’re up against somebody who is of the same ability,” Batt says. “You might get stuck in the centre [position] for a while, you might go back and forth a bit before the match is over.”

David Finch, the series director and co-producer, says arm wrestling is a popular sport in eastern and northern Europe.

“The series idea was brought to us by an arm wrestler,” Finch says. “I knew of arm wrestling, most people do, but I never thought that there was such an underground culture of arm wrestling.”

Each episode of the series weaves together the stories of two of the arm wrestlers as they juggle family lives and jobs to find time to compete in the sport.

“We were able to follow the track of some of these people as they went from one competition to another,” Finch says. “And then we followed their lives to see what they were like as people, where they lived, what their jobs were and who their family was.”

Finch says Batt was featured in an episode that looked at the challenges of being a female arm wrestler.

“She is a single mom and she has to deal with two young kids while going to arm wrestling practices and competitions,” Finch says. “So we follow her as she is trying to keep her kids busy while she is competing.”

Arm Nation airs Saturdays on APTN. Check your local listings for show times.