Wok racing

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Wok Racing

Georg Hackl's four-person woksled during the Wok World Championship 2006 in Innsbruck
First played	2003
Characteristics
Team members	Teams of 1 or 4
Type	Winter sport, Time trial
Equipment	Wok
Venue	Bobsleigh tracks

Wok racing is a sport developed by the German TV host and entertainer Stefan Raab in which modified woks are used to make timed runs down an Olympic bobsleigh track. There are competitions for one-person woksleds and four-person woksleds, the latter using four woks per sled.

Wok racing was inspired by a bet in the German TV show Wetten, dass..?. In November 2003, the First official Wok World Championship was broadcast from Winterberg. The immediate success led to the second world championship in Innsbruck on March 4, 2004. Participants are mostly b-list celebrities like musical artists, actors, and TV hosts, but there are also known athletes that have ongoing professional careers in winter sports, like three-time Olympic luge champion Georg Hackl and the Jamaican Bobsled Team. The third championship took place again in Winterberg on March 5, 2005. In contrast to the previous championships, there were two runs in which all contesters participated. The times of both runs were added. As a further innovation a qualifying round was created in which the participants had to jump from a trickski-jump with woks to determine the starting order. Further the sport event was professionalized.^{[citation needed]}

The typical racing woks are the ordinary round-bottomed Chinese pans, usually directly imported from China. The only modifications are that the bottom is reinforced with an epoxy filling and the edges of the wok are coated with polyurethane foam to avoid injuries. Four-person woksleds consist of two pairs of woks, each of them is held together by a rounded frame. The two pairs are connected by a coupling. Due to the rather risky nature of the sport the participants wear heavy protective gear, usually similar to ice hockey equipment. To further reduce friction and the risk of injuries, the athletes wear ladles under their feet.^[1]

To improve performance, the undersides of the woks are often heated with a blowlamp before the race.^{[citation needed]}

Public wok racing is only practiced once a year at The "World Wok Racing Championships" (German: Wok-WM, German pronunciation: [ˈvɔk.veːˌɛm], lit. Wok Worldcup) which is aired as special edition of Raab's show TV total on the German television channel ProSieben. The network used to declare these broadcasts as sporting events. Under German law that allowed the network to treat the massive corporate sponsorship of the event as incidental advertising which didn't count against Germany's strict rules regarding time limits for TV commercials. After a Berlin court ruling in 2009, however, the shows have to be labeled as an infomercial, since – unlike a regular sporting event – the races are explicitly staged for the TV broadcast, and there is strong evidence that the profits of the event sponsorship directly benefit the network.^[2]

• November 6, 2003: Winterberg
• March 4, 2004: Innsbruck
• March 5, 2005: Winterberg
• March 11, 2006: Innsbruck
• March 9, 2007: Innsbruck
• March 8, 2008: Altenberg
• March 7, 2009: Winterberg
• March 19, 2010: Oberhof
• March 12, 2011: Innsbruck
• March 10, 2012: Königssee
• March 2, 2013: Oberhof
• March 8, 2014: Königssee
• March 14, 2015: Innsbruck
• November 12, 2022: Winterberg
• November 11, 2023: Winterberg

Year	Gold	Silver	Bronze
2003	Stefan Raab	Joey Kelly	Detlef Soost
2004	Georg Hackl	Joey Kelly	Stefan Raab
2005	Georg Hackl	Stefan Raab	Joey Kelly
2006	Joey Kelly	Georg Hackl	Stefan Raab
2007	Georg Hackl	Joey Kelly	Stefan Raab
2008	Georg Hackl	Christian Clerici	Joey Kelly
2009	Georg Hackl	Felix Loch	Joey Kelly
2010	Georg Hackl	Joey Kelly	Christian Clerici
2011	Georg Hackl	Felix Loch	Lucy Diakovska
2012	Georg Hackl	Lucy Diakovska	Joey Kelly
2013	Georg Hackl	Lucy Diakovska	Armin Zöggeler
2014	Joey Kelly	Georg Hackl	Armin Zöggeler
2015	Armin Zöggeler	Georg Hackl	Joey Kelly
2022	Joey Kelly	Lucas Cordalis	Jolina Mennen
2023	Joey Kelly	Armin Zöggeler	Sophia Thiel

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