DETROIT — A rubber band ball built over more than a decade in a garage on the city's east side has been certified as the largest in the world, Guinness World Records announced this week, tipping the scales at 11,578 pounds — more than five standard sedans.
The record belongs to Claude Moore, who began making rubber band balls during childhood visits to the doctor for hemophilia, a blood-clotting disorder that required him to spend long stretches sitting still. The habit followed him into adulthood, and in 2015 a group of coworkers challenged him to build something enormous. Moore spent the next ten years wrapping band after band around a growing sphere in his garage, eventually moving it to a storage unit as it outgrew the space.
A new heavyweight champion
A Guinness World Records adjudicator witnessed the ball's official weighing at Belle Isle, the Detroit park and recreation area, in late August. The reading of 11,578 pounds — more than 5,251 kilograms — easily surpassed the previous record of 9,032 pounds, set by Florida resident Joel Waul in 2008 after seven years of work.
Guinness has tracked the largest-rubber-band-ball title since the 1970s, and the record has changed hands only a handful of times, each time by a build that took years rather than months. Moore's ball now holds the title by a margin of more than 2,500 pounds, the largest jump between record holders in the category's history.
From hospital waiting rooms to a world record
Moore has said little publicly about the scale of the achievement beyond confirming the numbers to Guinness, but the project's origin — a coping mechanism from childhood medical appointments — has resonated with hemophilia advocacy groups, who have pointed to the record as an example of a chronic condition shaping an unlikely passion rather than limiting it.
Local reaction in Detroit has focused on the logistics: moving an object the weight of a delivery truck from a residential garage to a storage facility and then to a public park for weighing required specialized equipment, and Belle Isle's grounds crew assisted with the final transport.
Guinness records in the "largest ball" family — rubber bands, twine, duct tape and others — tend to draw repeat challengers once a record is broken, and officials with the organization say they expect new attempts on the rubber band title within the next few years, given how publicized the Detroit record has already become.
