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Six Months of World Records In and Around Toronto, and What Little We Learned
Whatever Ontario’s position relative to other parts of the country and the world in terms of affluence or opportunity or any of the other intangibles that make a place great, one thing is certain: we make the biggest smoothies anywhere.
In 2006, a Booster Juice in Kitchener set a world record for largest-ever smoothie, with a 740-litre concoction of strawberry and banana. But this past summer, as part of a publicity stunt staged by the Dairy Farmers of Canada, that record was shattered right here in Toronto. The new reigning world’s-hugest-smoothie, made on July 9 in an empty lot on Queens Quay West, was one thousand litres and blueberry-flavoured. Cups of it were handed out to a crowd of perhaps two hundred onlookers.
“It’s not great, but not bad,” said a man in a business suit, presumably on break from his job in a nearby office building. This was a generous assessment. The smoothie was thin and purple, with chunks of blueberry pulp floating in it—essentially milk with texture. We poured most of ours down a storm drain.
Over the course of the past six months, many world records have been set in and around Toronto. In keeping track of them, our hope was that, taken together, they’d reveal something about this place: what Ontario excels at, maybe, or why so many of us are interested in the attempts of Ontarians to beat the world at various things. But the truth is, these records are at best scattered data points. They do, though, all have at least one thing in common: everything in the following catalogue was at one point either reported by a news outlet, or summarized in a press release.
Could it be that world records are nothing more than serviceable news filler? If so, is this post a case in point? So many troubling questions.
Some records were food-related. On May 7, Ted Reader, a TV barbeque chef and cookbook author, made the largest ever hamburger, a 590-pounder, in Yonge-Dundas square. Later, on July 16, at halftime during a Hamilton Tiger-Cats game, competitive eater Pete Czerwinski ate a seventy-two-ounce steak in under seven minutes, which he has claimed, plausibly but without any official substantiation, is the fastest time ever recorded for the consumption of that amount of steak. In September, Czerwinski attempted to eat fifteen pounds of poutine in one sitting, live on the radio, but didn’t succeed.
Other records were mass performances. On July 25, in Yonge-Dundas square, a group celebrating “Youth Day,” including ex-mayoral contender Joe Pantalone, set what they claim is a record for the largest gathering of people simultaneously doing the twist. On September 1, during orientation week at Ryerson, a group of students (961, by their own count) set an alleged world record for most people beatboxing simultaneously. Neither of these records has yet been recognized by Guinness World Records. (Guinness has dropped the “Book of” from their name.)
On October 24, at the Sheraton Centre, a charity called Windfall Basics set a world record for the most people dressed as brides gathered in a single location. Some of the participants were guys wearing ill-fitting white dresses over their clothing.
On June 19, in a west-end Toronto park, a group of Roncesvalles residents created what they say was the world’s longest chain of beads, though Guinness has yet to recognize the claim.
And then there were the individual feats. In August, the Star reported on Sudesh Muthu, a Thornhill man whose dreadlocks were recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s longest. (“I can’t even do a run, because I might step on my hair,” he told them.) On September 18, residents of Cobourg, Ontario cheered on Kevin Fast as he attached himself, with a harness, to a prefabricated house and pulled it 11.95 meters, earning him the world record for pulling a prefabricated house with a harness. He did it as a promotional stunt for Habitat for Humanity. The Guinness adjudicator who was there to witness the attempt congratulated Fast on a record “we’re quite certain will not be broken until you choose to break it again,” which probably is a safe assumption.
At the beginning of August, a University of Toronto engineering Ph.D. candidate named Todd Reichert completed the longest sustained flight ever recorded by a pilot in a human-powered machine. His vehicle, an ornithopter called Snowbird, whose flapping wings were controlled with a foot pedal, stayed aloft for 19.3 seconds. It was a unique achievement in the history of aviation, and it received well-deserved international press.
Considering the number of people living in and around Toronto, it’s not surprising that some of what they do is world-beating. What is surprising is that of the many world-beating things Ontarians do, most of the ones that are in any way quantifiable are pretty trivial. Often this is by design. Many world records, including many of those mentioned above, are carefully staged in advance in order to attract media interest, and in fact Guinness World Records abets this. For a fee, Guinness will not only send an adjudicator to witness a world record, but they’ll consult on planning the attempt.
But there are also those rare people, unaffiliated with any organization or group, who compete with the world for reasons that are entirely their own.
“I believe that God is with me,” said Suresh Joachim, a forty-year-old Mississauga man who claims to hold more world records than any other resident of Canada. (Guinness currently credits him with sixteen.) “I’ve seen the God, probably when I was ten years old, and he showed everything I’m going to be.”
What Joachim has become is a serial performer of world-record-getting stunts, many of them requiring extreme endurance.
Last summer, Joachim spent nine days at Scarborough Town Centre Mall, where he said he was ultimately successful at breaking the existing world record for continual stationary cycling, though Guinness hasn’t yet recognized his claim. He said he rode his stationary bike for a total of two hundred hours, with periodic five- to fifteen-minute breaks for rest and washroom trips. For the purposes of self-promotion, the attempt was ill-timed. It ran from June 25 to July 3, meaning Joachim cycled through the entire G20 summit and its immediate aftermath.
He did it to raise funds for Operation Eyesight, a charity that promotes eye health in the developing world. The money, he said, came from corporate sponsors.
Most of Joachim’s other records are of a similar type. He has crawled a mile on his knees, moonwalked for over thirty miles, ironed clothing continuously for more than fifty-five hours, and once set a record (since surpassed) for continuous television viewing, on a couch in the lobby of WABC-TV in New York City, while making periodic appearances on The Regis and Kelly Show―making him perhaps the only man in media history to have made it on TV by watching the same. For his wedding, in 2003, he created the world’s longest bouquet, at just over sixty metres, and also set a record for most groomsmen associated with a single groom: forty-seven.
Joachim wants to use his notoriety to help raise money for underprivileged children around the world.
He first discovered the Guinness Book of World Records (as it was then known) in 1991, while he was still living in his native Sri Lanka. An uncle gave him a copy.
“So I was turning the pages and I see, like, you know, football players, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan. You know, all the popular stars, they are in the Guinness Book. And I said, ‘Oh, this is a good idea to get in the Guinness Book, because this book is selling in one hundred countries, and in more than twenty-eight languages. So this is a great book to promote my ambition and what I’m going to do.”
Ambition seems to be a large part of even the smallest world record attempt. After all, there are potentially as many as six billion other possible claimants to any given record. It’s a cutthroat game. Even the world’s shortest man was recently unseated by someone two inches shorter, who had only been waiting to turn eighteen so he could claim the title. The previous world’s shortest man had only held his title for five weeks, itself a record for the least amount of time anyone has ever held the title of world’s shortest man.
No newspaper wants a picture of a short man whom other men are shorter than. His size is only of interest if it’s beyond compare. He has at least that much in common with mediocre smoothies.