CRAZY CONTESTS

Waipa Post, Volume 45, Issue 3251, 5 November 1932, Page 2

CRAZY CONTESTS

ROLLER-SKATING ROUND THE WORLD A young Ccot named Maurice Walton, one of the three survivors, of a field of 632 who starte, from Los Angeles four years ago to roller-skate round the world for £14,000, has just arrived at Camden, New Jersey having completed 40,512 miles of the journey. The original plan was to cover 60,000 miles in eight years, perhaps the m -st stringent test of endurance ever conceived. The contestants must walk, skate, or exercise at least 16 hours a day, sleep upright in. chairs, eat no meat, fish or dairy produce, abstain from smoking, swim daily, and sleep at least six hours. In the four years the survivors have visitors 34 countries and of the original 632 starters no fewer than 73 have died. A contest even more fantastic than this, took place recently in Rome for the benefit of local charities. The antagonists vied with each other in swallowing nails, driving hatpins through their tongues, and walking barefooted up and down a staircase of swordpoints. The contest arose out of a challenge delivered from the pit of the Quiroino Theatre to Mantelli, the celebrated Italian "Fakir," who was demonstrating some of his experiments on the stage. ALL TOGETHER—SLEEP The spiritual home of such contests of course, is America, where even children devote their ' leisure hours to competitions ranging from scooter-speeding to tree-sitting and see-sawing. The present crazy season , now drawing to a close with the coming of the autumn, opened with a sleeping contest, which took place in a Long Island swimming pool. The contestants tried to sleep 13 hours a day for 14 clays in succession, the schedule being from 9 p.m. until ten o'clock in the morning at which hour the sleepers were awakened by the ringing of an alarm bell.

A special sleep-inducing machine was employed to assist in making contestants fall asleep while training was also permitted, an entrant being allowed to go on. a spree and stay up for a week, or take any other measures to exhaust himself. Everybody, however, had to fall asleep on the premises, a precaution designed to avod the use of anaesthetics or other unnatural means of inducing slumber. Sleepers, on their part, were protected from foul play by being encased in sound-proof glass cases, so that no outcry could disturb them. THE BEES-WON Some year s ago a contest was decided in this country between bees and pigeons. The bees, twelve in number, were released three miles from their hive, and the same number of pigeons an equal distance from their cote the first six to arrive home to be the winners. The first bee was home half a minute before the first birds, while three more bees reached their hives before thesecond pigion.. But America is not the only

country where crazy contests are staged. Lase year a series of races were run in Australia between an. ostrich and a horse, the latter just managing to win in the sprints, but the bird winning with ease over a long distance. More recently a mysterius stranger strode into a wellknown Sydney Club and offered to race anyone over a distance of 220 yards, the local man to be on ho'rseback, the challenger on foot. A crack rider took up the apparently mad challenge on an equally crack racehorse. At the half-distanole any odds' could have been obtained on the horse, for it was leading comfortably, but the runner put on a desperate spurt and won by several yards.