Limbo Skating

The future of Olympics?

By Sean Sweeney

I know the expression you made when you opened this page and saw the picture. It’s the same one I made—that one where you arch your neck, rear back, and scrunch your face before “ewwwww”-ing.

That picture is nasty. I don’t care how flexible someone is. I don’t care if you’re Shawn Johnson. No one can look at that without cringing. At that angle, it’s almost impossible to tell what is going on. The child is all arms and legs, stretched out across the opening like a spider. Those pipes hanging just above the child’s head actually form the bottom of a car. And those wheels at the end of the kid’s spiny legs are roller blades.

In India, a new sport is taking over the modern culture of the young generation. It’s called competitive limbo skating. The title is pretty self-explanatory.

Competitors need extreme flexibility and a diminutive size. Therefore, most of them are tiny kids. Pulling on their skates, they push themselves under parked cars. With their chins running no more than 8 inches above the cement ground, the skaters float through one car and on to another.

That kid in the picture, Aniket Chindak, is the greatest limbo-skater this planet has ever seen. He holds the world record by skating under 57 cars in just 45 seconds. He trains four hours a day and works tirelessly on the strength and flexibility needed to compete at a sport like this.

In a recent article profiling his rise to Internet fame, the six-year-old Aniket said of his first introduction to limbo skating: “It took three months before I could get my body in the right position. Since then, I have skated under lots of cars and have never hurt myself.”

Sean Sweeney is a regular contributor to The Greasy Pole.