Last weekend proved a bumper one for sport. With Euro 2008 kicking off in Austria and Switzerland, Montreal witnessing Robert Kubica’s maiden F1 victory and Rafael Nadal wrapping up his fourth straight French Open crown in Paris, there really was something for everyone.
Well, almost.
Across the channel, London was gearing up to host one of the more obscure “sporting” events played out over the weekend, the Red Bull Flugtag.
For the uninitiated, the sport, a term used in the loosest possible manner, involves competitors launching their homemade contraptions from the end of a 6m high platform, endeavouring to defy all common logic and physics in the hope of achieving man-powered flight before plummeting to the water below.
But Flugtag, somewhat optimistically translated from German as ‘flying day’, is about much more than bloodying Mother Nature’s nose. Marks are also awarded for the creativity of a team’s machine as well as the obligatory dance routine prior to take-off meaning that distance covered doesn’t always win the day.
Naturally then, Flugtag purists would argue that engineering excellence isn’t rewarded but given that very few of the machines were air-worthy anyway, a light hearted approach was probably the correct course of action.
Commentators often talk of the perfect conditions for the staging of a major sports event and if the Flugtag could be described as either major or indeed a sport, then it was difficult to imagine any better than those over Hyde Park on Saturday. With the sun shining and a slight tail wind to boot, the first of the craft, a winged toilet, obviously, was wheeled into position at the rear of the runway. 30 seconds and a bizarre bathroom and bubbles routine later and it was off, pushed by an enthusiastic crew with dreams of their loo soaring effortlessly into the blue sky above, unencumbered by the constraints of common sense.
It didn’t need an expert in aeronautical engineering to predict what followed. Reaching the end of the ramp, the 6ft polystyrene bog dropped like a stone into the Serpentine below, unable to escape gravity’s irresistible force. Seconds later and her crew were similarly sodden as they joined their bobbing craft beneath the runway to the delight of the assembled crowd.
And so it went for the rest of the afternoon. Heaven knows how papier mache Chickens, handbags, badgers and submarines passed the apparently stringent safety tests. One deluded sole even tried peddling a child’s tricycle to terminal velocity before toppling head over handlebars into the murky depths. Just one of the 43 entrants could lay claim to being a genuine flying machine. The Cullinan Bird, a vast v-winged creation, managed nearly 40m of glide time before succumbing to its inevitable splash landing, enough for the mostly sunburnt and inebriated 80,000 strong crowd to launch into rapturous celebration.
Around the world last weekend sportsmen and women went to do battle, those with the most competitive instincts ultimately proving victorious. In Hyde Park though, they just came to have fun.
