Lockdown’s new sport: the unexpected thrills of marble racing
The lack of televised sport in lockdown has wreaked havoc on viewing habits, said Esther Addley in The Guardian. Some sports fans have resorted to watching Belarussian football; others have turned to Korean golf. But one of the truly unexpected hits of the coronavirus era has been competitive marble racing.
To call it a sport is not far-fetched: there are marble teams, with their own home tracks; there are referees and earnest commentators. In a typical race, gravity pulls each glass ball down a winding, elaborate track for anywhere between a few seconds and a couple of minutes. In the past three months, the YouTube channel Jelle’s Marble Runs has seen its subscribers double, to more than 1.1 million; marble racing is now aired on ESPN, the American sports channel.
Marbles have been “rolled, thrown, dropped and flicked” for thousands of years, said Mariel Padilla in The New York Times. But it’s only in the past few years that the channel started by Dutch marble enthusiast Jelle Bakker and his brother, Dion – Jelle’s Marble Runs – has turned marble racing into the sport it is today. JMR organises an annual Marble League, featuring more than 15 team and individual events, including hurdles and underwater races. Its captive audience of fans analyse marble stats online. They discuss the marbles’ “personal lives”, but are strongly discouraged from discussing the pandemic. Indeed, the marble community makes every effort to operate outside the realm of Covid-19. “The races are meant to be an escape from the real world.”