They rose up by the dozens from across Florida, caricatured competitors in tank tops and cutoff shorts, for a showdown that treats evading police and wrestling over beer like Olympic sports.
Promoted as “the most insane athletic showdown on Earth,” the Florida Man Games poke fun at the state’s reputation for bizarre stories that involve brawling, drinking, gunfire, reptile wrangling and other antics carrying a risk of time in jail or intensive care.
Several thousand people paid to come cheer a dozen teams at the debut event set for yesterday in St Augustine, with contests and sideshows inspired by real events from the US’ most surreal state.
Photo: Tyler Watts via AP
“I have an absolute disregard for self-preservation. I will do anything,” said Larry Donnelly, 42, who owns a St Augustine pressure-washing business and serves as captain of the five-man team Hanky Spanky. “When I was in the military, I did a little alligator wrestling.”
To train for the games, Donnelly rode a bicycle around his neighborhood with a second bike strapped to his back.
His event: a race requiring competitors to switch between bikes while toting a catalytic converter and a handful of copper pipes, common items in Florida theft stories.
Other events involve contenders wrestling sumo-style while holding pitchers of beer, or running from actual sheriff’s deputies while jumping fences and avoiding obstacles.
Some signed up to duel with aquatic noodles over a mud-filled pool, while others faced a scramble to grab cash flying in simulated hurricane winds.
Florida Man Games organizer Pete Melfi said he was stunned to find nobody else had beaten him to the ripped-from-headlines idea for a spoof sporting event.
He said he expected more than 5,000 spectators paying US$45 or more per ticket to join the fun at the city’s Francis Field.
“We kind of give a person an opportunity to live a day in the life of Florida man without ending up in a cop car,” said Melfi, who runs the St. Augustine media outlet The 904 Now.
He had to tone down some racier aspects of the Florida Man mythos to obtain a permit.
“There’s typically drugs and nudity,” he said. “But the city frowned on it when I asked for drugs and nudity.”
The “Florida Man” phenomenon seeped into the nation’s conscience thanks in part to a Twitter account that started in 2013 with the handle @_FloridaMan. The account touted “real-life stories of the world’s worst superhero,” sharing news headlines such as “Florida Man Bites Dog to ‘Establish Dominance’” and “Florida Man Tried to Pay for McDonald’s With Weed.”
Florida’s claim to being the strangest state goes back much further, said Craig Pittman, a Florida journalist who wrote the book Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country.
He said that the first flag to fly over its state Capitol in 1845 bore the motto “Let Us Alone.”
Apparently nobody listened. Florida today has 22 million residents, the third-largest population of any US state. They all share roads, beaches and timeshares with more than 130 million tourists per year.
“You cram that many people together, they’re bound to start running into each other’s cars and chasing each other with machetes,” Pittman said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS