Snail racing simulator

The real thing

Snail racing is a genuine sport, and a wonderfully British one at that. Somewhere between a village fête, a sporting tradition and something invented because it was raining, people have been gathering to watch numbered garden snails cross damp cloth for decades.

The World Snail Racing Championships have been held in Congham, Norfolk, since the 1960s. Competitors are common garden snails, Cornu aspersum if you're being formal. Each gets a number painted on its shell and starts in the middle of a damp cloth. First to cross the circle 13 inches away wins. That's it. That's the sport.

The record belongs to Archie, who covered the course in exactly two minutes in 1995, a blistering 0.006mph. More than thirty years later, nobody has caught him. Heikki managed 3 minutes 2 seconds in 2008, Terri 2 minutes 49 the year after, and Sammy got it down to 2 minutes 38 in 2019. The dream remains alive.

Over in Cambridgeshire, the Grand Championship Snail Race at Snailwell has been running since 1992 and can attract up to 400 spectators, more than doubling the population of the village. The starting call, "Ready, steady, slow", came from the 1999 Guinness Gastropod Championship and remains the best thing anyone has ever said to a damp cloth.

The snails here race the same distance at roughly the same pace, with approximately the same understanding of what's happening. None of them has ever failed a drugs test. Mostly because nobody has tested them.

Know your snail

Snails are molluscs, distant cousins of the octopus, though you wouldn't guess it from watching them. They breathe through a hole in their side called a pneumostome, their blood is faintly blue, and they eat using thousands of microscopic teeth arranged on a ribbon called a radula.

Their eyes are on the ends of the long tentacles. The shorter pair are used for smelling and feeling their way around, which seems sensible when your top speed is measured in thousandths of a mile per hour. They don't have ears either, so they can't hear a thing, cheering included. Please cheer anyway. It's good for morale, probably yours. The shell is mostly calcium carbonate, the same stuff as chalk. A snail hatches with a tiny shell already attached and adds to it as it grows. Most land snails are both male and female. Given the choice, they'd do most of their moving at night or after rain, which goes some way to explaining the times.

There's more on Wikipedia, all of it apparently true.