Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  In Wright’s case, he relied upon the book itself as the basis for going forward with an attempt that would presumably not have received pre-approval. But with records retired for being dangerous, sometimes no amount of preparation can ensure the company will not become skittish, such as when Ashrita Furman recounted staffers changing their minds about allowing his assault on the forward roll record. This can be especially frustrating when the attempt undertaken in vain is life threatening. Robert Masterson, president of Ripley’s Entertainment, described one such case.

  Here’s an example to show the frustration of the public with the way Guinness World Records does things. Because we run the museums, people contact us about how to break records and we tell them how to contact Guinness. Well, there has been a record for the most times someone has kissed a cobra. So a guy from Thailand contacts us and wants to break it, so we put him in touch with Guinness World Records. They spelled out the whole thing, how he had to do it, how high the table had to be, all these rules, and then he went and got the snakes, did everything the way they explicitly told him to, and he did it, risking his life, and then they tell him “sorry, the record has been retired.” I think “why not tell him that in the first place?” Now you’ve got an enemy for life. He did exactly what they told him to do, could have been killed, then went and told all his friends he had set the record, and he ends up with nothing but frustration to show for it. That kind of stuff happens with them all the time.

  While several categories of records have been banned, rested, or retired, others are so patently dangerous they have never been approved in the first place. Such was the fate for the man who inquired about setting a record for spending the longest time in a chamber filled with tear gas. “We didn’t want it in the book because of all the other deranged people that would try it,” explained editor Donald McFarlan. The applicant for the record for falling down flights of stairs got the same response. Likewise, it may not matter to a lot of world record aspirants, but another type of record unlikely to be embraced by the book is one that involves removing large sections of skin from the body. In 2007, Hong Kong civil servant Barry Kwok sent the book’s officials a twenty-two-centimeter flap of sunburned skin he claimed he had peeled from his chest back in 1979 and kept for nearly thirty years. Kwok said it took him and his sister some ninety minutes to remove the patch; he believed it was the largest piece of freestanding burned skin in the world, and one that amazingly came off of his body in the shape of a map of China. Guinness World Records refused to award Kwok his certificate, but the jury is still out as to what would be the fate of future peeled skin aficionados. While current editor Craig Glenday sensibly told the Birmingham Post, “We didn’t want other people to be ripping their skin to bits to try and beat it,” other Guinness World Records officials told the Times that they refused Kwok the record simply because he cannot prove the skin is his.

  The unofficial record for a bizarre case of record attempt gone bad has to belong to the Murugesan family. Despite the record mania that India is infamous for, it is hard to imagine just what Dr. K. Murugesan and his wife, also a medical doctor, were thinking when they allowed their fifteen-year-old son to perform a Caesarean section on an apparently unknowing patient in an attempt to get him into the Guinness World Records book as “youngest surgeon.” The couple own a private maternity clinic where their son Dhileepan Raj performed the operation on an anaesthetized twenty-year-old woman in 2007 while his parents supervised. His proud father videotaped the operation, and later showed it to a chapter of the Indian Medical Association, explaining to the audience that he wanted his son to earn the Guinness record as the world’s youngest surgeon. To his surprise, his colleagues were more horrified than impressed, so Dr. Murugesan told them it was no mere whim or fluke—he had been training his son for three years and it was not the teen’s first operation. As the Times reported, “When the chapter members reacted with horror, accusing him of violating medical ethics, Dr. Murugesan denied any wrong-doing and accused them of being jealous of his son’s achievements. He argued that if a ten-year-old is allowed to drive a car and a fifteen-year-old can graduate as a doctor in the United States, then his son should be allowed to be a surgeon. ‘We were all shocked, but he just didn’t listen,’ said Venkatesh Prasad, secretary of the Manaparai Medical Association. ‘He said that we were jealous and were not recognizing his son’s progress. He had no consideration for the ethics of the surgery.’” Officials immediately began a professional and criminal investigation into the matter, while Amarilis Espinoza, a spokeswoman for the Guinness World Records, told the Associated Press that the book did not endorse such feats because they would encourage “bad medicine.” Like thousands of would-be record holders before him, Dr. K. Murugesan apparently made the classic error of not running the particulars of his record attempt by the book in advance. The Times further noted that the incident “also reflects the enduring fascination of Indians with setting world records, even when they put lives in danger. Last year a four-year-old boy tried to run a 43-mile marathon in an attempt to enter the Indian version of Guinness World Records. Doctors stopped the boy when he showed signs of exhaustion after 40 miles and later found him to be malnourished, anemic and under cardiac stress.”

  Another victim of the book’s safety rules is American performer David Blaine, who has somehow made a living and landed television specials by doing exactly the kind of things Guinness World Record holders have done for years without financial reward—but he does them to far less impressive extents. Blaine has buried himself alive, an oft-challenged category since the very first book, and one in which he is not even remotely competitive. Likewise, he has tried pole squatting, and again does not come near the book’s mark. His latest stunt was imprisoning himself in a box, an above-ground variation on burial alive. In September 2003, Blaine was sealed in a Plexiglas box suspended from London’s Tower Bridge over the Thames River, with the goal of starving himself for forty-four days. While Blaine often calls himself a magician, this was neither a world record nor a magic trick, but rather some weird hybrid of physical feat and performance art. The attempt, titled “Above the Below,” was apparently devised entirely to get media attention, the closest he has so far gotten to having something in common with actual Guinness World Record holders. The book’s officials said they had been contacted by the performer, asking for his feats to be recognized, but a spokeswoman replied, “We do wish him well, but he has got a long way to go to beat the incredible Guinness record holders.” Likewise, the book dismissed his earlier efforts including being buried alive and living in an ice block, because they did not break any records. Blaine’s box-above-the-Thames stunt also failed record official’s tests on two counts. The seven-foot temporary home was deemed not as small as current record holders for such confinement, and from a safety standpoint, the book refuses to endorse fasting records, despite having previously featured a hunger strike category. Keeper of the Records Stewart Newport told Glasgow’s Evening Times, “We have never encouraged actively claims for the longest time to voluntarily go without solid food.” Much to his credit, Newport rhetorically asked the question dogging too many record breakings gone bad. “If you beat the ‘record’ and then die is it a successful attempt?”

  In silent answer to Newport’s question is Hans Rezac, the jumper whose attempt to set a Guinness World Record by parachuting over the South Pole did not earn him a spot in the book but took his life instead. Would Rezac have jumped if not for the record? No one can say, but it hardly matters: his flight was full of other parachutists, some who lived and some who died, record book or no record book, and they will not be the last to try it. Those seeking the rush of adrenaline, the promise of fame, or the conquest of their fears will continue to be injured or killed, perhaps influenced by the glory that comes with getting into Guinness, perhaps not. “People will do dangerous things whether or not we record them,” Craig Glenday told the Financial Times. That is certainly true, but it also seems reasonable to a
ssume that more people are likely to try to break such records by virtue of them being certified as records rather than just crazy onetime stunts. In the same article the Financial Times noted that “He [Glenday] points to a Japanese craze called banzai skydiving where participants throw out their parachutes, then dive after them to hook up with the bag on the way down. That one makes the book.” Just don’t try it while eating marshmallows.

  Epilogue

  What a long, strange trip it’s been.

  Four years ago I first had the idea to do a humorous article for Golf Magazine on trying to golf my way into Guinness. Now this book has been written, and in the course of writing it I traveled the world doing research, with countless hours spent interviewing countless characters who “colorful” does not even begin to describe, and poring over articles and original documents in various libraries in various cities. I have seen the identical flash of recognition in the eyes of hundreds of strangers and friends as the topic brought them back to the iconic record holders of their youth, Robert Wadlow, long fingernail guy, and the McCrary twins astride their motorcycles.

  If asked four years ago what really got me started on this book, I’d have said that English newspaper clipping and my article for Golf. But I would have been wrong. Now I know that my interest began about thirty years earlier, when I was an elementary school student in New York City. I remember a dog-eared copy of the Guinness book on the library shelf of my classroom at PS 92 in Queens. All the kids, myself included, loved to flip through its pages and marvel at the records and the photos, accounting for the tired condition of the volume, which was probably a few years out of date, though the inspiration it provided never got old. This all came rushing back to me in late 2004, when an elementary school teacher I know asked me to visit her fifth grade class in Lebanon, New Hampshire, to talk about journalism. I had prepared as best I could for a bunch of eight-and nine-year-olds, but it was hard to get them interested in my work until my friend Sarah let it slip that I was in the Guinness World Records book. There was no turning back, and it was all the kids wanted to hear about, with questions reaching a fever pitch. Like me, three decades earlier, they had a well-worn, out-of-date copy of The Book on the classroom bookshelf, and despite living in the era of MTV and DVDs, the Internet and cell phones, they were as fascinated with the accounts of people ascending the stairs of skyscrapers on pogo sticks and holding live rattlesnakes in their mouths as I had been at their age. I now suspect that virtually every classroom in America has held an aging but in no way obsolete copy of the book during all those intervening years, and we as a nation are better for it. For children, and the child in each of us, Guinness World Records are the stuff of dreams.

  This fascination is not entirely limited to kids, and the enduring popularity of The Book cuts across all demographics and ages. After all, almost every (human) record setter is an adult, and the books are bought by readers of all ages. I recently visited movie star Bruce Willis’s vacation home in the Caribbean’s Turks & Caicos islands (he was not there), and snuck a peak at his bookshelf. There were just a handful of volumes, including several on the flora and fauna of the region, alongside the Guinness World Records. I suspect that with more than 110 million copies sold, in thirty-seven different languages, his is not the only household, celebrity or nobody, family or childless, young or old, that owns a copy. I have nearly fifty different editions myself.

  It is impossible to overstate the social significance of the Guinness World Records book, especially in these times. It seems that half the programs on television are so-called reality TV, and many younger people today believe this trend started with shows like Survivor and the original Big Brother. In fact, all reality television, as well as shock or exploitation talk shows have their roots firmly planted in the Guinness book. It was the first public forum, in print and on the airwaves, for ordinary people to do things, sometimes amazing, sometimes humiliating, but always “real,” and then get media exposure as a result. In the same vein, Guinness can be considered the genesis for the success of online self-media outlets like YouTube, MySpace, other social networking sites, and the entire concept of blogging. The Guinness book created the notion of a pathway to media visibility and potential recognition for those outside of the Fourth Estate, even if, as with many blogs, no one reads or cares. The idea that a person could convince themselves that they and their opinions or actions were newsworthy or interesting to strangers, that someone else out there might just want to read about them, began with the book, and technology and the media have sought out myriad variations on this theme ever since.

  When I started this project, it was a labor of love as I had an unquenchable passion for all things Guinness World Records. When I discovered the history of Sir Hugh Beaver’s question and the McWhirter twins, as unique and offbeat and oddly gifted as any of the characters they immortalized, it seemed the stuff of a noble fantasy. But along the way I also got to see some of the less pleasing aspects of the book and its history, the way it warps some of its would-be record holders, the way it panders to the crisis of celebrity worship in our society, the way it twists the media, and the way it has changed and rechanged its mission and style and meaning over the decades.

  So what do I think now?

  There is still a lot of positive energy surrounding the book. It is after all, a children’s book, and it still excites and interests children, which is a good thing. I saw this firsthand in the elementary school classroom I visited, I have seen it in the households of my friends with children, and I have had countless peers tell me it is on their kids’ Christmas or Hanukkah wish lists. National Geographic Kids magazine runs a monthly Guinness Records feature, and the editor assures me that there is an important educational component, and that the records help teachers teach kids about a wide variety of topics, including geography. Just getting kids to read anything today is becoming an increasing challenge, and the book certainly helps out in that regard.

  There is also a kind of purity in the book’s pages. Despite some irregularities and the habit of playing favorites with the media and celebrities, for the most part Guinness World Records has long had an obsession with fairness and maintaining a level playing field; it is one of the few remaining democratic institutions in our lives. The rules surrounding each record attempt, no matter how odd it appears, are lengthy and detailed and mostly standardized, all in the name of keeping apples only to apples (or oranges to oranges) when it comes to records. The thing that surprises record laymen the most is the fastidious red tape involved in the process. Records approved by Guinness (except the “firsts”) are meant to be broken, and to that end each one is documented and administered in a way that makes it as fair as possible to all comers—except me, but we’ll get to that. With a few exceptions, the world of Guinness is impartial to race, creed, or bankroll, and in its pages one finds true diversity: anyone with enough self-motivation and drive can enter its hallowed pages. For instance, when breaking the distance golf travel record, I was specifically told that only commercial flights, and no private jets, could be used, lest my record become the unassailable province of eccentric billionaires. While the book is home to its fair share of professional athletes, including many of the all-time greats, it is also the last bastion of pure amateurism, celebrating the drives and passions that were once embodied by the Olympic Games. Fifth graders are routinely told that in America anything is possible, that they can grow up to be doctors or lawyers or even the president. Some are already smart enough to know that these promises aren’t completely true, but at the same time they recognize that there are many ways for them to excel. Guinness embodies this belief: there is a spot for them in its pages if they put their minds to it.

  That’s the good news. The bad is that the book and its staff often show little regard for its most hard-core fans, the record breakers themselves. The record application process appears to be intentionally difficult to navigate; it is tedious, and they are slow to respond, having embraced technology in
form but not function. Moving their record mechanics online seems to be no improvement over old-fashioned mail, except that the powers that be can now discourage applicants without actually contacting anyone. Making people wait months to do something the book needs them to do to in order for it to continue to exist seems counterproductive, as does changing rules and record parameters retroactively, and consistently employing a pattern of keeping information that has no monetary value hidden from readers and fans.

  There seems to be almost an air of paranoia surrounding the book, dating all the way back to the first lunch meeting the McWhirters had with Sir Beaver in 1955, when Norris McWhirter noted his boss’s penchant for secrecy. Being obtuse for the sake of being obtuse has become business as usual at Guinness. I understand why every record cannot be in the book, as they simply wouldn’t fit. However, when I suggested to Stuart Claxton, head of business development in the United States, that they also publish an unabridged edition and charge a hundred bucks or more for it, or sell it on CD or DVD, he couldn’t give me any reason why they should not do this, except for vague rumblings about the proprietary value of their database. This would be the equivalent of Webster’s holding back words from the dictionary, but never selling or productively using them. For half a century they have been operating with some sort of black hole philosophy, sucking in records and then hiding the vast majority of them from outside eyes, never acknowledging that the only value these records have is to readers who will pay to see them and those who want to break them. Yet they choose instead to hide them and get no value at all from the collection. This attitude extends to their interaction with the press, and it didn’t make me feel any better about the company when they tried to stop me from writing this book. I went to them openly seeking cooperation and explaining that not only did this book not conflict with their sales—no one interested in records is going to buy my book instead of Guinness, and I don’t expect a lot of eight-year-olds as customers—but it might rekindle the interest of many readers my age who had not actually bought one in decades. Every single person I have spoken to in the media and publishing industries—who does not work for Guinness World Records—agrees, but they said no. Not only did Guinness World Records say no, but they first led me to believe they were seriously considering it, apparently in an attempt to extract as much detail about my plans as possible before turning their lawyers loose. The Book could be so much better, but it seems bogged down in poor customer service, inattention to detail, and frustratingly bureaucratic management.