Matchstick sculptor’s dream of setting a world record nearly goes up in flames
Richard Plaud labored 4,200 hours over eight years to painstakingly transform more than 700,000 matchsticks into a 23½-foot-tall model of the Eiffel Tower, driven by a goal he had held since he was a boy: earning a Guinness World Record.
Plaud, a 47-year-old from western France, finished his sculpture late last year and submitted his creation to Guinness, confident that — since it topped the record holder by more than two feet — his model would be crowned the world’s tallest matchstick sculpture.
The verdict came on
Jan. 24: disqualification. Guinness had ruled his model ineligible because he had used matchsticks that were not commercially available.
“I was very surprised, and very disappointed,” Plaud wrote in French in an email translated by The Washington Post. “I was disappointed that the judges didn’t take into account all the work that had been done.”
Plaud’s childhood dream was crushed. Upset, he published a Facebook post on Jan. 30 describing Guinness’s reasons for denying him a world record. Headlines about Plaud’s “great disappointment” followed, igniting a debate about his disqualification. Within days, Guinness hinted at a possible reversal, saying its decision might have been “a little heavy handed.”
Guinness said it would review the decision, which Plaud expected could take weeks.
“I had also prepared myself for the idea that my tower was never going to be recognized as the new world record,” he wrote.
When he was 8 years old, Plaud was already developing a love of building and creating. A year earlier, he had begun building Lego houses to create scenery for his model trains. He studied civil engineering in college, and he began building matchstick models in 1996, when he was 20, making a construction crane that was 8 feet tall. He finished it in 1999.
“I’ve always loved to construct, build, create things that don’t yet exist,” he said.
After finishing the crane, he hungered to create something bigger and taller. The idea to do the Eiffel Tower, a symbol for the French and an internationally recognized icon, “quickly became obvious.” He also hungered for the challenge that its technical complexity would pose.
But Plaud wasn’t sure how he would go about constructing it. For years, he kept the idea in the back of his mind, hoping one day to start the project. Then, another recordseeker took a stab at his idea.
In November 2009, Toufic Daher unveiled his matchstick sculpture of the Eiffel Tower, which stood just shy of 21½ feet, at City Mall in Beirut, becoming the world record holder. Six years later, at the end of 2015, Plaud finally hit upon his own strategy.
Inspiration struck when he found a 4-foot-tall metal model of the tower that he used to help him create blueprints — and he knew how tall his tower would need to be to break the record.
The metal replica he’d found was 1/270th the size of the real thing. Plaud scaled that up, multiplying the dimensions by six to get a sculpture that was 1/45th the size of the Eiffel Tower — 23.6 feet, sufficient to break Daher’s world record by more than two feet. Plaud decided to build it in 402 pieces, allowing him to disassemble, store and reassemble it.
He started building the tower on Dec. 30, 2015. At first, he bought matches at the grocery store, cutting off the red tips, which were difficult to build with. But after doing that with more than 54,000 of them, he grew weary enough that he contacted a French manufacturer to ask whether he could buy them in bulk without the tips. The manufacturer agreed, and Plaud purchased 760,000 matches that weighed upward of 132 pounds.
The sculpture was Plaud’s project but not his obsession. Plaud, who manages roadway projects for the regional government, dedicated about 10 hours a week to the model, mostly on weekends and after family dinners on weeknights. His wife and two teenagers were supportive, but it was important to Plaud that his project didn’t take away from their family time.
He designed the tower as he built it, solving problems as they arose. Building models requires being patient, meticulous and good at math and design, Plaud said — along with “a three-dimensional imagination” to be able to envision the finished project.
“Above all,” he said, “it requires keeping your childlike spirit.”
He finished construction on Dec. 27, nearly eight years after he started and the 100th anniversary of the death of the real tower’s designer, Gustave Eiffel, which was not an accident.
“I wanted to give him that nod,” Plaud said.
On Jan. 7, he applied for the record, a submission that required video footage of a professional surveyor measuring the sculpture’s height. Plaud said he was surprised and disappointed when he learned in late January that the judges had disqualified his sculpture. They told him that he was being eliminated because the materials he used were not commercially available or recognizable as matchsticks.
The ruling shocked and saddened him, Plaud said. He told The Post that it would have been impossible to build his tower without cutting off the tips.
Plaud said he told the