Sometimes there are dreams that seem like they are going to collapse like a house of cards or like an Eiffel Tower made of matches, but they finally come true. That is precisely what happened to Richard Plaud (47), the Frenchman from Montpellier-de-Médillan, in the west of the country, who was trying to get the Guinness record for the tallest structure ever built in the world with only matches and glue. Before the Frenchman's attempt, this milestone was in the hands of the Lebanese Toufic Daher, who built a 6.53 m Eiffel Tower in 2009.
On December 27, coinciding with the centenary of Gustave Eiffel's death, Plaud finished and presented his 1/45 scale, 7.2 meter high reproduction of the Eiffel Tower, the most popular building of this engineer and icon of France. At the same time, he sent the request to Guines World Records (GWR) to validate his as the highest.
It took 4,200 hours over eight years, 706,900 matches and 23 kilos of glue, which he used to complete his project. Initially, Plaud used commercial matches which he cut and from which he discarded, one by one, the red match heads. Tired of this tedious process – and who isn't? – and faced with the prospect of having to do it with more than 700,000 matches, he asked the manufacturer who supplied them if he could buy, in 15 kg boxes, only the wooden sticks without the heads, perfect for building a model, but technically they are not matches like those that anyone can buy in a shop, as stipulated by the GWR rules.
And that's where the problems came last Wednesday. The GWR officials, in charge of certifying Plaud's feat, told him that it could not be approved because he had not used matches that were "commercially available."
“They considered that my matches were not available for sale, so they were invalid. “It's quite surprising and actually quite upsetting. It's not exactly fair play. What hurts me the most is that they don't recognize the work I did, the time I dedicated to it, the mental energy, because I can tell you that it wasn't easy," Plaud explained to the BBC. “For eight years, I always thought I was building the tallest matchstick structure in the world,” he told Reuters.
But on Thursday, just a day after Plaud's tower missed the cut, and after reviewing its case, GWR admitted that perhaps they had been too harsh.
Mark McKinley, director of Central Records Services, told Sky News that they were “very proud to be as thorough as possible in reviewing evidence, because our rules and requirements level the playing field for everyone, everywhere, of the who want to try for a record. However, having learned more about the techniques used by the matchmaking community, and upon second review of this achievement in relation to similar ones we have awarded, it appears that we have been strict in applying our rules in this one. case".
“We are therefore very pleased to award it the title and have corrected some inconsistencies within our rules which now allow matches to be cut and shaped into whatever shape the shaper sees fit,” McKinley added. “We are sorry for the distress that the last 24 hours will have caused in what should have been a time of celebration for Richard. I hope he accepts our belated congratulations on behalf of everyone,” he concluded.
Now we just have to hope that no one approaches Plaud's tower with a match, this time headed and lit.
