Office chair race - With discreet tuning to victory
The file is on the desk and the folder it belongs in is in the office behind the back. It doesn't take a necessarily lazy employee in this situation to see that he doesn't get up to get the folder. After all, a well-measured push off from the desk with both legs is much more fun to dash backwards towards the shelf. Sporty people take the same route back - after all, the child in the man or the lady wants to be nurtured a little, even in the driest of working days. Like everything that is fun, this principle has become a sport: a fun discipline.
On the global triumph of the fun sport of "office chair racing"
André Franquin, the great Franco-Belgian comic artist and creator of such ingenious series as "Spirou and Fantasio", "Marsupilami" or "Gaston", is known to have had an anarchistic sense of humour. In this respect, the anti-hero Gaston was his most important work: Franquin immortalised a bit of himself in the experiences of the, by conventional standards, terribly unproductive and useless, but all the more creative office boy. While Gaston is rather impassive about the conventional use of office furniture, he develops an almost sporting zeal when it comes to misusing it. He installs a pedal drive in them, invents seat shells with which he can drive down railings, invents a hanging chair transport system for branching office buildings - and likes to compete against the stopwatch during office hours in an office sport: office chair scootering.
What was the genius of a unique artist decades ago is now a reality: office chair racing exists as a fun sport cultivated worldwide. But from the beginning. While Gaston kneels with one leg on the seat of the chair and pushes off with the other foot, thus racing through the office corridors, the "actual sport" is limited to two principles: exploiting gravity and minimising resistance, similar to the principle of a soapbox race or sprinting on the flat - or a mixture of both. This, at least, is the result of extensive research in the depths of the search engines, sometimes with the help of a Chinese keyboard. Because who is really surprised? Office chair races are a big thing in China. According to unreliable sources, however, the Japanese are said to be the inventors. Until a few years ago, a team in Bad König in the beautiful Odenwald region organised a German championship that made it into the international media. In San Clemente, California, they are relaxed and also allow longboards and tyred couches to race. As in all other aspects of life, the British are not averse to this curiosity, and there are also tournaments in Australia, France, Sweden and Spain where the focus is on speedy progress on a piece of working furniture.
Different variants and an internationally surprisingly similar set of rules
Whether downhill or on the flat: the daredevil ladies and gentlemen compete against each other on their rolling furniture and try to get across the finish line as quickly as possible. Unlike most other sports, tuning is expressly permitted in office chair racing and it is left to the imagination and craftsmanship of the participants to decide how to convert their chair into a rolling racing machine.
As is generally known, an office chair consists of a backrest, possibly armrests, a swivelling seat, a height-adjustable main column and a swivel base to which four or five castors are attached, depending on the model. According to most regulations, the castors must not be larger than 20 centimetres in diameter, must move freely and, of course, must not have a drive. It is rumoured that a particularly ambitious office chair pilot has equipped his vehicle with rockets and in the meantime flies a course around satellites in Earth orbit. There is also a rumour that at least the second part of the rumour is really a rumour.
Desk chair tuning is expressly permitted
The office chair is actually controlled by merely shifting your weight, and this is where the fun begins. Anyone who has ever rolled through the room on an office chair and tried to make a controlled turn knows that this is actually an impossibility. The contortions of the racing pilots are correspondingly spectacular and at least as spectacular are most of the attempts to influence the rolling direction with the feet. It doesn't matter whether they sit on the chair, lie on their stomachs or on their backs: the outgrowths of bizarre postures during the elimination fights, which mostly follow the KO principle, are correspondingly varied. Speaking of "KO": Active influence on the opponents is also forbidden, according to most rulebooks. In other words, anyone who kicks his competitor out of the way, trims him as he passes or actively influences the direction of travel of the opposing vehicle will be disqualified.
A popular tuning measure is to increase the weight, although a sense of proportion is required here: if too many commercial discs are attached to the turnstile, the vehicle picks up speed too slowly - if there are too few, precious seconds are wasted. Particularly popular with office chair pilots: Extra-wide "orthopaedic" office chairs, which are much smoother than the entry-level model. Another proven measure is an office chair castor replacement, a bearing upgrade or simply lots and lots of good lubricant.
An office chair tuned up in this way can reach a speed of 35 to 40 kilometres per hour; accordingly, protective equipment is prescribed or at least strongly recommended. Helmet, elbow, knee and wrist pads are common, as are gloves. Assuming that a normal office chair with an average seat height of 50 to 70 centimetres allows for a significant fall, even a full-face helmet is advised. Because if one thing is certain: falls are a matter of course in the roller competitions and often an ingenious part of a kind of doomed choreography - which serves the sole purpose of amusing the audience.
Office chair racing, extreme ironing and bog snorkelling
If a book on fundraising ideas is to be believed, there are even office chair racing world championships - and, incidentally, global tournaments in worm digging, extreme ironing, shin kicking (!), cheese rolling, bog snorkelling, nettle eating - although in the case of the latter discipline, it is hopefully a matter of only spelling the name of the sport correctly. As with all fun tournaments, however, the office chair race is primarily about having fun. Accordingly, local organisers can set their own rules and, for example, allow pushers, build a course of water machines, photocopiers, potted plants and wastepaper baskets in the way or, in the spirit of Gaston, hold a pedal chair race - whatever pleases, amuses and focuses on the misuse of rolling swivel chairs is allowed.