No Sports?

Marble League 2019

Competitive Marble Racing Finds Fans in a World Missing Sports
By Mariel Padilla, The New York Times
April 18, 2020

Videos of competitive marble racing have gained widespread attention as nearly every sporting event, major and minor, has been placed on hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“It sucks us into another world, another dimension without war, misery and negativity,” said Dion Bakker, a founder of the YouTube channel Jelle’s Marble Runs.

The world of marble racing recently got a boost from a tweet featuring a video of marbles rebounding along an outdoor sand track.
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Greg Woods, 31, of Iowa, a commentator for Jelle’s Marble Runs, said the races provide the same emotional experience as sports with human players.

“There are still underdogs and upsets — something to cheer about,” he said.

The Bakkers’ YouTube channel, which gained more than 150,000 subscribers last month, has partnered with Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile and been featured on ESPN and NBC Sports. The videos draw about 10 million views per month, with nearly half coming from the United States, Dion Bakker said.

Jelle Bakker has been making marble runs since he was 4 because he liked the colors, movements and sounds of the marbles, his brother said.

Mr. Woods stumbled upon his first Jelle’s Marble Runs video in 2016 and was struck by the starting lineup and the marbles’ names. For example, Team Galactic are transparent spheres with brown and silver swirls and the O’rangers are solid orange.
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“There’s really no handbook for how you call these races,” Mr. Woods said. “Certain things you can pull from auto racing and human sports, but there’s only so many ways to describe how marbles roll.”
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Occasionally, Jelle Bakker orchestrates a moment that mimics human behavior, Mr. Woods said.

Once, a marble streaked across the track, delaying an event, before it was escorted off the premises. Another time, a fight broke out in the audience among rival fans.

The marbles’ teams have home tracks. There are referees and a stadium of fans — all marbles. When the races begin, gravity pulls each glass ball, 16 millimeters wide, down a winding track to the soundtrack of a cheering crowd.

Time Check, an all-male a cappella group at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., has even recorded chants for each of the marble teams.

The team behind Jelle’s Marble Runs has since expanded to 15 people. In addition to the Bakker brothers in the Netherlands and Mr. Woods in the United States, there’s a composer in Greece, a graphic designer in Belgium, a manager in Germany and others in charge of frame-by-frame analyses.

“We had no expectations when we started filming marble runs,” Dion Bakker said. “We thought we would stop eventually, but it was a big success.”