Take it from a world champion

Take it from a world champion: The best way for a man to carry a woman is to dangle her upside down over his back, with her thighs squeezing his neck and her arms around his torso. "That way, your arms are free to help with balance. It's more stable. There's less shifting of the weight," Margo Uusorg said. He has just carried Egle Soll, her pigtails flapping against his back, around a 278-yard oval track that includes a 3-foot-deep water trough and two hurdles of wooden logs. In just over one minute, they won the Estonian championship here and qualified for this weekend's Wife Carrying World Championship in Sonkajarvi, Finland, where Uusorg was a heavy favorite to win his third world crown. "When you carry this way," he said, "it's much easier." Estonian men turned up in this little farming village lugging their women upside down five years ago, and the sport of wife-carrying hasn't been the same since. Suddenly, gone were the glory days of the piggyback carry, the fireman's carry, the wrap-around-the-shoulders carry. The "Estonian carry," as it was dubbed, was in. And Estonians have won five straight wife-carrying world championships. (Actually, "wife-carrying" is a misnomer, for the rules in the freestyle competition allow the man to carry any woman older than 17, his wife or not.) This Estonian dominance doesn't sit well with the Finns, who have been wife-carrying since the late 1800s, when marauding gangs would make off with women from neighboring villages.