10 Ridiculous Times World Records Were Rejected – Listverse
Not everyone can be an Olympic gold medalist, win an Oscar or a Nobel Prize, or sell millions of records. But there is a way for people who lack such traditional talents to achieve something that will be recorded for posterity along with their names: breaking a world record. With a little creativity and hard work, anyone can do it.
However, having the freedom to choose which discipline or activity you want to attempt a world record in doesn’t mean there are no rules at all. In fact, it’s quite the opposite when it comes to Guinness World Records verifying a record. Many only discovered after their attempt that they had missed something in the fine print, and in many cases what seemed like a clearly broken world record has been rejected on technical grounds. Here are ten of the most heartbreaking and hilarious examples.
Related: 10 world records that have never been broken
10 Eating the evidence
North Tehran, 2008. It’s early in the morning and a thousand chefs gather in front of the crowd and television cameras. They are about to take part in the preparation of the most unusual meal of their career: a 1,500-meter-long ostrich meat sandwich. It will take hours to pack the whopping 1,000 pounds of meat, but it will be worth it in the end. They must have gotten great publicity for ostrich meat. But more importantly, they will have beaten the Italian sandwich of 1,378 meters and conquered the world record.
At least that’s what they hoped before the drooling crowd of onlookers engulfed the enormous sandwich and started eating it before the Guinness representatives could measure it. Unable to verify its size, they had no choice but to reject the record. On the other hand, the secondary purpose of the stunt, namely to promote the consumption of ostrich meat in Iran, was successful.[1]
9 Too many materials
Strangely enough, the largest type of food doesn’t always have to be made from the right ingredients to break the world record. An example of this is a huge lollipop sculpture that was erected in the town of Ravensthorpe, Australia, in 2019. At almost 8 meters high and 4 meters wide, it was believed to be larger than any other statue. other menacing lollipop on the planet when it was officially unveiled. However, the application for the Guinness World Record was rejected.
The reason wasn’t that it was inedible or even because of its size. The problem was that it was made of aluminum and steel. To qualify for the record, Guinness required the statue to be made of only one material. However, the rejected record did not bring down the city’s residents. They hoped that the lollipop would attract tourists to the problem area and that it would promote more creativity and happiness in the community.[2]
8 Matchstick mix
It was also the bad luck of Frenchman Richard Plaud to choose the wrong material for his attempt to build the world’s tallest model of the Eiffel Tower from matchsticks. The model was completed in 2023, on the 100th anniversary of Gustav Eiffel’s death, and took him eight years to build. More than 23 kilos of glue held together the 706,900 matches needed to reach a height of 7 meters. However, they were not the right matches. Plaud bought them directly from a manufacturer who sold them to him without the red sulfur tips.
According to Guinness officials, only “commercially available” contests are allowed. Since matches are not typically sold this way, the plate was rejected even though the red bits would have been shaved off before being used in the model. This seemed like a harsh way to dismiss one’s dream, and fortunately for Plaud, someone at Guinness must have agreed. The day after the decision, officials reversed their position and congratulated him on setting a new world record.[3]
7 No scrubs
World records can provide a path to sports stardom for those without world-class athletic skills. This is because they can be super specific. For example, running the fastest marathon ever is impossible for most people, but running the fastest marathon dressed as a nurse is realistic. In fact, nurse and runner Jessica Anderson almost broke the latter while training for the 2019 London Marathon, so she decided she would make an official attempt that day.
She finished in a time of 3:08:22, beating the existing record by 32 seconds. But her application for the world record was rejected. Why? Because according to Guinness, she wasn’t dressed as a nurse. She had chosen to wear real scrubs, but the requirements called for a fancy dress nurse outfit with a traditional cap and apron. After she complained about the outdated requirements and received online support from other nurses, Guinness agreed to revise their criteria and ultimately awarded her the record.[4]
6 The ‘tornado with turban’ was too old to prove that he was the oldest
Earning a great nickname like the ‘Turbaned Tornado’ might have taken the sting out of this next rejected attempt at running a record-breaking marathon. Unfortunately for the runner, whose real name is Fauja Singh, this decision could not be reversed. It was impossible for him to provide the proof that Guinness needed. The record in question is the oldest man to complete a full marathon, a record Singh is said to have set in Toronto in 2011 at the age of 100.
It took him more than eight hours, fourteen minutes of which he reached the starting line, and no one disputes his inspiring feat of completing the entire distance. The problem was verifying his age. Officials demanded a birth certificate, but Singh was unable to produce one because no official birth records were kept in India in 1911, the year his passport shows he was born. Being a British citizen, he also received the official letter from Queen Elizabeth II sent to her centenarian subjects. But even this would not convince officials to grant him the record.[5]
5 Hanging left
Some Guinness World Records have age restrictions. And while it’s one thing to stop someone from attempting a record because they’re out of the age range, what happens if they’ve already done it and succeeded? Or has this not only succeeded, but also broken the existing record? In December 2023, the world found out, and unfortunately, it seems like the officials preferred to stick to their rules rather than report the record in the real world. This was the result for Helena, an incredibly strong eight-year-old girl from Leeds, UK, who filmed herself performing an excruciating 35-minute dead hang.
The previous record for a woman of any age was less than half that, at exactly 12 minutes. But Guinness disqualified Helena’s record because of her age. They said the physically demanding nature of the challenge meant they could not allow children under 16 to attempt it. Helena’s family and even their local MP urged Guinness to reconsider the decision. But they didn’t, leading to a bizarre situation where at least one ‘official’ world record is known to be wrong.[6]
4 Too young to qualify
Another British youngster who has missed a world record – actually two world records – is Lauren Booth. Despite having cerebral palsy, Lauren is an elite cyclist who held national records in 2015, when she was just 13 years old, and could pedal 200 meters around a course in under 15 seconds. A few years earlier she had taken only slightly longer (15.129 seconds) to complete the 200 meters at the Wales National Velodrome. It was a speed that would have been a record at the time, but was denied because she was too young.
In 2015, Lauren then set an astonishing time of 14.402 seconds. It became her new personal record and was intended as a world record attempt. However, the invited doping testers did not show up. This meant that the record would not have counted. But as luck would have it, her great time wouldn’t have been fast enough by then either. The record was broken a few hours earlier on the other side of the world, in New Zealand.[7]
3 Too windy
In July 2022, Nigeria’s Tobi Amusan delivered a stellar performance in the women’s 100 meters hurdles at the World Athletics Championships. She had broken the world record in her semi-final, finishing in 12.12 seconds. This made her 0.08 seconds faster than the previous title holder, and she still had the last race to go. In top form, she won gold with an even faster time of 12.06 seconds. However, this was not registered as a new world record.
As the holder of the existing record, which she had set just two hours earlier, and taking home the gold medal, Amusan was probably not devastated by the denial of the record. She may have wondered why, and the answer is that the wind value was too high. This meant she had too much backing to make a fair comparison with other records, so this one did not qualify.[8]
2 When a city is not one area
Another way to set a world record that is open to everyone is to organize a meeting of something. Bring together more of the same in one area than ever before, and it could be a record. Of course, there are limits to what counts as one area, as the town of Hoschton, Georgia, discovered in 2008 when they were denied the Guinness World Record for the most scarecrows.
In 2008, they decided to make their annual scarecrow contest even bigger by attempting to beat the record of 3,311 scarecrows collected five years earlier in Cincinnati, Ohio. They succeeded with a total of 5,441 scarecrows. But even though they had more than 2,000 extra scarecrows – including a stuffed Elvis and Jesus – Guinness denied the record.
Unlike in Cincinnati, where they were put on display at a show, the Hoschton scarecrows were scattered throughout the city streets. According to the officials, this would not count. However, organizers were still pleased with the community spirit and attention the city received from the event.[9]
1 A Titanic collection
There are numerous records about the ‘world’s largest collection’. Just like the scarecrow example above, anyone can do them because all they need is a little imagination, time and the resources to bring many similar or related things together in one place. But not many of exactly the same, because according to Guinness, duplicates do not count in a collection. It’s easy to see why this rule might exist; Officials certainly do not want to spend their time verifying, for example, the largest “collection” of sand or rice in the world.
As such, factories and warehouses would also have a major advantage over individuals. However, this rule meant that in 2023 a man from Florida with more than 2,000 copies of Titanic also missed on VHS. It’s okay though. His unique hobby may not have earned him the record for the largest collection, but what he really wants is to collect a million copies and use them to build a – hopefully record-breaking – replica of the Titanic.[10]