There’s the Rub

“Why do we do this to one another—rub soft tissue and pressure points, karate-chop shoulders, knead away at flesh?” asks Sarah Larson at one point in this story. The answers are many: it’s healing, it’s therapeutic, it’s comforting. But for those who descend upon Copenhagen each June for the World Championship in Massage, it’s also a chance to pick up some new techniques, and maybe a little bit of hardware.

For the next hour, we watched the category winners massage the judges, or Breinberg massaging herself. Len-Jinn Liang, of Canada, with his hair in a topknot, washed the feet and kneaded the legs of his recipient. Josep Lupién Porta, of Spain, in facial massage, rotated his model’s neck; soon, he feathered his hands over her face in rapid, fluid movements. Chudawan Wasuwan, of Thailand, in chair massage, was rubbing her recipient’s abdominal muscles; her treatment was called “Awaken the Dragon.” Marie Guittet, of France, in sports massage, briskly rolled her model’s calves with bicycle handlebars covered in yellow tape, a device that she calls the Booster; she had several handlebar sets, with tapes in various colors and textures, each for a different way of handling the fascia. Across the board, movements were elegant and practiced; occasionally, startling innovations were deployed. Wasuwan probed her model’s back and shoulders with a long bamboo stick, then tapped a block with a mallet on her stomach, producing a look of agonized bliss. At the end, Tengbjerg counted down, the audience cheered, and the judges groggily returned to alertness.