If you hadn't heard, January 31st each year has been designated
as "Backwards Day", an occasion to celebrate an inverse
perspective. This could be anything from walking and talking
backwards, to wearing clothes inside out, or even eating your meals
starting with dessert!
Here are a selection of weird and wonderful world record
achievements that have been set by doing things the wrong way
round:
There's a whole community of retrograde runners, men and women
who're constantly looking over their shoulders for what's ahead of
them.
Fastest of them all is Ferdie Ato Adoboe, who ran a backwards 100m
in just 13.6 seconds - not a lot slower than Usain Bolt!
Over greater distances other reversed runners excel, with D.
Joseph James managing one mile in 6 minutes 2.35
seconds, and Xu Zhenjun earning a title over the marathon
distance (26.2 miles), with a time of 3 hours 43 minutes
39 seconds:
Moses Lanham walks backwards in an entirely different way to these
athletes - no turning of the head is necessary, as he holds the
record for the largest external foot
rotation! Moses is able to move each of his feet round to an
angle of 120 degrees, and also holds a record for the
fastest time to walk 20 metres with the feet facing backwards -
19.59 seconds.
Looking for something a little faster? Dave Coates reached a speed
of 244.1 km/h (151.7 mph) on a motorcycle
sitting with his back to the handlebars, while fellow
petrolhead Darren Manning drove a Caterham 7 Fireblade kit car at
165.08 km/h (102.58 mph)
in reverse. Of course, the car will then need to be parked - so
call upon Ronny Wechselberger, who managed the tightest parallel
parking in reverse, squeezing into a space just 35 cm longer than
the car:
There's no need for an engine to set a speed record, though - the
very appropriately-named Anders Backe took to the slopes, clocking
a speed of 128.7 kmh (79.97 mph) while skiing backwards down the
Vikersund Skiflying slope in Norway:
From the icy slopes, we move on to the world of words: The fastest time to
spell 50 of them backwards is 1 minute 22.53 seconds by Shishir
Hathwar of India, while Michele Santelia in Italy has typed out
over 71 entire books completely in reverse - a total of 771,911
words, or 21,255,432 characters.
To finish on, we have just one word for you all:
saippuakivikauppias. At 19 letters long and reading the
same backwards as forwards, this Finnish word for a dealer of lye
(caustic soda) is the world's longest palindromic
word.
!yad sdrawkcab yojnE
