Alan Parish

Hailing From: London, England U.K.

Throwing Since: 2016

As one of the most prolific and accomplished Sports Throwing athletes in the U.K. and internationally, Mr. Parish has achieved over two hundred, top 5 categorical and overall placements, the majority of which were top 2, across multiple dozens of national and international events. Administratively, Alan is equally engaged in our sport and community. As Range Master he runs the Essex Backyard Throwers Club, U.K.’s largest Sports Throwing club for which he tells us he is most-well known. He is a secretary of the UKAT organization and is on the KATTA planning committee as well. In media, he has been both instructor and technical advisor for throwing stunts in film and television. All this in just eight years. 

Alan has collected a vast series of high placements across numerous categories, but he loves 3 meter silhouette for both knife and axe most of all, “I could throw that all day really. I like all the other distances, but Silhouettes is my favorite. I think it is very much like the Aim games, you have to aim at such a small margin of error, it makes you really tighten your game up”. While an inspiration to so many Sports Throwers, Alan tells us his own biggest influence is one of the most foundational members of the U.K. throwing community, John Taylor. Mr. Parish tells us, “John Taylor is the guy that started KATTA UK. He saw that I could throw quite well from the beginning and encouraged me to throw. That's when I became UK champion after two years and just got more and more encouragement from him, which was fantastic. I mean, he's well known pretty much around the world for all the throwing that he's done in the UK and organizing and promoting the sport”.

Having started the Aim Games in early 2018, Alan has been with us since ‘H2 Double Hawk Across Texas’. As a fan of both the games and the organization, he tells us “I haven't got a lot of room at home. With the Aim Games its shorter distances, so I can throw in my garden as I don´t need much space. You can compete, compare and see how other people around the world throw, it's just great fun. I think everybody can enjoy it, and that's all you need to do. The community is just fantastic. Everybody is happy to help”.

Nickname Backstory:

“ ‘AKP’ are my initials. It's just a nickname that I had for probably 60 years, and it's just carried on everywhere. It was a guy that was in my school. He called me AKP and suddenly everybody just called me AKP. I think it´s just very easy to remember and it stuck.”

Advice To New Throwers:

“If you've got the opportunity, try and find a club where you can go and get some proper tuition, and just enjoy yourself. It's a great sport. It can be very frustrating at the beginning but I think once you realize all the little things that you can change to improve, it just becomes great fun. I'm just happy to help anybody that wants a hand or any instruction. I´m always keen to encourage other people so that hopefully they can improve. I love seeing it when we have new members at our club and after a few months, you can see the enthusiasm grow as they improve. I think the next step from there is to try and encourage them to compete and that's where the Aim Games come in as well because I think they make people want to compete. But you're actually competing against yourself. So you're not really competing so much as you are trying to best yourself.”

Notable Achievements:

Outside the Aim Games, Alan K. Parish has achieved an astounding 219, top 5 categorical and overall placements across forty-one tournament events. Of those, 187 were top 2 placements, with 140 1st place victories. He was the KATTA UK National Tournament champion in 2017, 2022 and 2023, the 2022 UKAT Italy World Cup Walkback Axe champion, and swept the 2023 Essex Backyard Throwers competition, including scoring 70 out of a maximum 75 in silhouette. He took 3rd place overall in the 2017 UKAT French Championships and 2nd place in 5 meter axe at the 2018 Eurothrowers World Championships in Rýmařov, Czech Republic. Within the entertainment industry, Mr. Parish has been Technical Advisor and Instructor for ‘Celebrity Big Brother Axe task 2018’, was an Instructor to Hollywood A-Lister Mackenzie Davis in 2020 in preparation for her role as Grace in the film ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’, and was Technical Advisor and knife thrower for the ‘Lucky Me’ music video by Phoebe Green.

Inside the Aim Games, Alan holds a three Superstar rank and has placed in the top 20, six times. 16th place in ‘H4 Hall Of Fame Style’, 12th place in ‘K11 The Ladder’, 10th place in ‘K18 Pirate Island’, 4th place in both ‘K17 The Wall’ and ‘K20 Forest Nightmare’, and 3rd place in ‘K16 The Quest’.