Office Chair World Championships held in Switzerland

Daredevils race down a slope at the Office Chair World Championships in Olten Keystone-SDA

Around 20 daredevils raced down a steep slope in Olten on Saturday at the World Office Chair Racing Championships. The pilots reached breathtaking speeds on the 180-metre race track.

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“Formula 1 is child’s play compared to this,” one participant told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA after the race. Another, who travelled from Saxony (Germany) for the race, revealed his recipe for success: “I train every day at work.”

The participants in the World Championships were mainly from Switzerland. “But we invented the race, so we might as well call it the World Championships,” Lee Aspinall, inventor and co-organiser of the event, told Keystone-SDA.

The rules of the game are simple: the entire race route must be covered on an office chair. There are two categories: standard and kamikaze. In the standard category, standard office chairs were used; for the kamikaze category, they could be modified as desired.

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The start was on a three-metre ramp, followed by a descent down Olten’s Mühlegasse. Accident insurance is compulsory, as is a helmet. There were repeated crashes during the race. However, there have never been any serious injuries, said Aspinall. Just grazes and bruises.

The idea for such a race originated … in an office. In the office where Aspinall worked at the time, the meeting room was not located directly next to the offices. You had to take your office chair with you to meetings. “At some point, we started racing against each other on the way to meetings,” explained the inventor of the office chair race. The race was organised for the first time 25 years ago.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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