50 hours, over a million touches of the ball and not a single interruption: Ricardinho has beaten his own world record in juggling at the World Football Summit - and is also making a name for himself with other curious records.
Last fall, Ricardinho improved his own record to 49 hours of non-stop ball juggling. In the process, the Brazilian touched the ball a whopping 1,032,000 times.
The rules laid down by Guinness state that he can either take a five-minute break every hour or a 20-minute break every four hours. Under such conditions, there is of course no question of anything like sleep, but rather the little things in life such as a break in the toilet.
At the World Football Summit in Saudi Arabia, the left-footed player improved his own mark to 50 hours, saying that he had nine months of preparation behind him before his attempt. As a child, he once played for Atletico Mineiro, then at some point he stopped playing normal football. "I'm not a freestyler - I'm just looking for challenges," says Ricardinho.
And they are quite something. He has already juggled running for 28 days or 1558 kilometers - interrupted only to sleep. He has also run with a parachute and a ball.
Swiss juggling king on "Wetten dass...?
Incidentally, a Swiss man also made himself world-famous with ball juggling. Kurt Rothenfluh was a guest on "Wetten dass...?" in 2003. The Lucerne native made a bet with presenter Thomas Gottschalk that he could touch the ball more times in two minutes than footballers Thomas Hässler, Stefan Effenberg and Matthias Zimmermann put together. The bet was lost by a narrow margin of 616 to 615, but Rothenfluh was still crowned king of the competition by 53 percent of viewers.
Rothenfluh himself once held the world record for holding the ball up without interruption. In 1983, he touched the ball 105,400 times in Magglingen. According to an electronic measuring device, Rothenfluh managed an impressive 270 touches per minute.
Rothenfluh became world champion in football speed juggling in 2006. It took him just 30 seconds to touch the ball 154 times.
Rotenfluh did not lose his talent later on. In the summer of 2024, at the ripe old age of 65, he juggled a football 1440 times in ten minutes. Not only did he keep the football in the air constantly, he juggled without touching the ball twice in a row with the same foot, let alone with any other part of his body.
