Reverse course, Guinness gives a Frenchman's Eiffel Tower the record

Richard Plaud toiled for eight years to build a nearly seven-meter-tall model of the Eiffel Tower. Each of the 706,900 matchsticks he glued together brought the Frenchman one step closer to his dream: setting a world record for building the tallest matchstick sculpture.

But in late January, weeks after he completed the replica, Guinness World Record officials delivered devastating news: his Eiffel Tower was disqualified because it was built with the wrong type of matchsticks.

“It hurts me,” he told TFI Info, a French television network, in an interview broadcast this week. He also expressed his dissatisfaction on Facebook. “MAJOR DISAPPOINTMENT,” he wrote in a post last week. “Tell me the 706,900 sticks glued together aren't matches!!??”

However, on Thursday, after days of headlines about Mr Plaud's disappointment at his disqualification, Guinness reversed its decision and said it had made a mistake. Mr. Plaud had earned the title, Guinness clarified in a statement, even though he had used matches without flammable ends.

Mark McKinley, Guinness' director of records, said on Friday that the organization regretted any inconvenience it had caused Mr Plaud during what should have been a celebration.

On reflection, Guinness had been “a bit heavy-handed” in its interpretation of what a matchstick entailed, Mr. McKinley said in an interview. Although Guinness officials had initially defined matches as pieces of wood with a flammable end, Guinness later discovered that within the community of people who build things with matchsticks, cutting off the ends was standard practice to prevent fires, he said.

“If you have a flammable end, it becomes quite a dangerous activity,” Mr McKinley said.

Guinness contacted Mr. Plaud on Thursday to let him know he is the new champion, but he has not yet responded, Mr. McKinley said Friday.

Mr Plaud, who lives in western France, told Le Parisien that he completed his Eiffel Tower construction, which involved 50 pounds of glue, on December 27, the centenary of the death of Gustave Eiffel, the civil engineer for whom the real thing is named.

Guinness said it initially disqualified him because he had used specially ordered matches that did not contain the flammable tip. Mr. Plaud had started making his model by scraping off the sulfur end of matches, a laborious process, but decided to speed up construction by ordering custom-made matches without the end from Flam'Up, a French matchmaker, according to Guinness.

Guinness rules stipulated that the matches used had to be commercially available and not be cut, dismantled or deformed beyond recognition as matchsticks.

Mr. Plaud joins the winners in at least two other match categories: the largest collection of musical instruments made from matches and the largest match sculpture. The current champion of the first category is Bohdan Senchukov from Ukraine, with a collection of 14 match musical instruments, including a guitar made from 23,000 matchsticks, which took more than a year to complete, Guinness said. (The musical instruments are also made with matches without flammable ends.)

The title for the largest category of matchstick sculptures belongs to David Reynolds of Great Britain, who spent 15 years building an oil production platform in the North Sea. The previous title holder for the tallest matchstick sculpture, Toufic Daleh of Lebanon, who had also won for a replica of the Eiffel Tower.

Mr McKinley said Guinness's verification process is not simple or perfect, and missteps occasionally occur. “It's a shame it had to go this way,” he says.