Hong Kong's latest sport: baby racing
June 27, 1997
Web posted at: 10:51 p.m. EDT (0251 GMT)HONG KONG (CNN) -- Horse racing is a popular sport in Hong Kong, where tens of thousands of people frequent two race tracks on Wednesday evenings and weekend afternoons.
But baby racing may take some time to catch on.
A Hong Kong shopping center was the venue Friday for baby races organized by several baby magazines and a parents' group. Proceeds from the day were to be donated to the "Children's Cancer Foundation."
The judges selected 1,997 babies from a field of 3,000 drooling, cooing, wailing and even silent infants.
All were under the age of 18 months, and no allowances were made for sex. Boys and girls competed as equals, and all were pointed in the same direction.
Once the races began, babies crawled, scooted, lurched, staggered or were pushed and nudged toward the finish line by their parents. One was lured toward the finish line by his father, who held a soft-drink tantalizingly just out of reach.
Not all of the babies went along with it.
Some seemed genuinely uninterested in the idea of making a mad dash in any direction. They sat -- with the solemnity of Confucius -- pondering their competitors and the excitable adults who were cheering them on.
It was the toddlers who showed off their motor skills who got the ink.
"We didn't train him," one mother told a reporter. "We just let him do his thing."
Reuters contributed to this report.
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