Last year I could have sworn that from the spot outside the Grimaldi Forum in which I am currently standing, I could have watched a sedate and thoroughly civilised exhibition of the sport of pétanque, or boules.

Yet what I see now is a strikingly well-muscled man in a red and white Canada shirt laying into a log of hybrid poplar with devastating power, a clear, almost frenzied, sense of purpose and a very sharp axe.

"Stihl Timbersports – the original extreme sport," says the slogan.

For someone whose prior notion of timbersport was a man in a kilt tossing a caber, I must admit this was a new one on me.

When I made further enquiries via two representatives from a German media production company called Smaragd Media, I was told that this idea of timber sport utilising saws and axes originated in Australia in 1920, nearly a century ago.

Stihl, which turns out to be a Stuttgart-based maker of chainsaws, trimmers and the like, established its timbersports series in 1985.

According to the blurb: "Athletes compete in a variety of disciplines based on traditional logging skills to determine the best all-around lumberjack".

My friends from Smaragd explain that there are six disciplines, rejoicing in names such as "underhand chop" and "single buck", my personal favourite, in which a disc is cut off a tree trunk using a cross-cut saw which, at two metres, is the length of a very tall man.

This year’s world championships, coinciding with Stihl’s 90th anniversary, take place in Stuttgart in two weeks’ time.

This event is men-only; I am told there is not yet a women’s World Championship, although I expect this will come in time.

After the exhibition, I catch up with Worcestershire-based Spike Milton, the global sports director, whose time in New Zealand has left him with a distinct Kiwi accent.

He further reveals:

● That the wood selected for use tends to be either hybrid poplar or white pine, which is "kinder to our racing saws";

● That the sport tries to be environmentally conscious, recycling its used wood to biomass and not ordering trees to be cut during the nesting season;

● That athletes wear chain mail on lower legs and feet for protection.

The last of the knights in shining armour then.

The presence of the likes of Smaragd/timber sports helps explain why SPORTEL's David Jones is able to point to a 21.8 per cent increase in new companies among delegates in Monte Carlo this year.

A revised layout has increased exhibition space and helped encourage the approximately 3,000 delegates to circulate around all stands.

Among them on Wednesday was Prince Albert II, reigning monarch of the principality that hosts the SPORTELMonaco event and International Olympic Committee (IOC) member of more than 30 years’ standing.

I have to say that another of the things I wasn’t expecting to witness at SPORTEL was the sight of His Serene Highness wearing a virtual reality-style headset.

Yet this is what he did for a few minutes in the stand of a visual media company called Livit.

When I dashed along intent on repeating the Prince’s experience, I was put straight by Marc-Oliver Lepage and Bertrand Nepveu of Vrvana, the Montreal-based company which made the headset, who told me this was actually an example of augmented, rather than virtual, reality.

They then kindly granted me a similar demonstration to that experienced by the Prince, featuring a blue vintage sports car which appeared to be present on donning the mask.

Virtual reality is one of the technologies that is expected to be much in evidence at the next SPORTELAmerica event in Miami next March.

 "It is something I expect to be very key to the next event," says Jones.

One further observation from this convention on the Med that, it occurs to me, is not necessarily to insidethegames’s advantage: gentlemen's ties are starting to acquire the status of an endangered species at SPORTELMonaco.

By way of a random experiment, I tried to count the number of ties among 20 or so men talking business one afternoon in the area assigned to the MP & Silva agency: the answer - four or, at most, five.

Happily, I have every confidence in the ability of our managing director to come up with an equally stylish and memorable means of building the brand and signalling our presence in a largely tie-free environment should this in time be deemed necessary.