Richard Plaud toiled over eight years to build a nearly 24-foot model of the Eiffel Tower. Each of the 706,900 matchsticks he stuck together brought the Frenchman one step closer to his dream: achieving a world record for the tallest matchstick sculpture.
But in late January, weeks after he completed the replica, Guinness World Records officials delivered devastating news: His Eiffel Tower was disqualified because it was built with the wrong type of matches.
“It hurt me,” he told TFI Info, a French television network, in an interview broadcast this week. He also expressed his displeasure on Facebook. “BIG DISAPPOINTMENT,” he wrote in a post last week. “Tell me the 706,900 sticks stuck one by one aren’t matches!!??”
By Thursday, however, after days of headlines about Mr Plaud’s dismay at his exclusion, Guinness reversed its decision, saying it had made a mistake. Mr Plaud had won the title, Guinness said in a statement, even though he had used matches without flammable ends.
Mark McKinley, director of records at Guinness, said on Friday that the organization was sorry for any distress caused to Mr Plaud during a period of celebration.
On reflection, Guinness was “a bit boring” with his interpretation of what constituted a matchstick, Mr. McKinley said in an interview. While Guinness officials initially defined matches as pieces of wood with a flammable end, Guinness later learned that within the matchmaking community, cutting off the ends was a common practice to prevent fires starting, he said.
“If you have a flammable limb, that makes it quite a dangerous activity,” Mr McKinley said.
Guinness contacted Mr. Plaud on Thursday to let him know he was the new champion, but has yet to hear back, Mr. McKinley said on Friday.
Mr Plaud, who lives in western France, told Le Parisien that he finished his construction of the Eiffel Tower, which involved 50 pounds of glue, on December 27, the centenary of the death of Gustave Eiffel, the civil engineer after whom the real thing was called.
Guinness said it had initially disqualified him because he had used specially ordered matches that did not include the lit tip. Mr Plaud had started building his model by scraping the sulfur off matches, a laborious process, but decided to speed up construction by ordering custom tipless matches from Flam’Up, a French matchmaker, according to Guinness .
Guinness rules stated that the matches used had to be marketable and not cut, disassembled or distorted beyond recognition as matchsticks.
Mr. Plaud joins the winners in at least two other matchstick categories: largest collection of matchstick musical instruments and largest matchstick sculpture. The current champion of the first category is Bohdan Senchukov of Ukraine, with a collection of 14 matchstick musical instruments, including a guitar made of 23,000 matchsticks that took more than a year to complete, Guinness said. (The musical instruments were also made with matches without flammable ends.)
The title of the largest matchstick sculpture category belongs to Britain’s David Reynolds, who spent 15 years building an oil production platform in the North Sea. The previous holder of the tallest matchstick sculpture title, Toufic Daleh from Lebanon, had also won for a replica of the Eiffel Tower.
Mr McKinley said Guinness’s verification process is not easy or perfect, and from time to time involves mistakes. “It was unfortunate that it had to go this way,” he said.