/ 8 November 2007

‘Ear, ‘ear, it’s only 5m …

A British man on Thursday failed in his record-breaking attempt to pull a 7,5-tonne red London bus over a distance of 10m, using his ears.

Manjit Singh (57), a former police officer who now owns a security services company in Leicester, central England, managed to pull the Routemaster Bus over half the distance, about 5m.

He had hoped to kick off the third annual Guinness World Records Day with his feat, attaching a steel rope to both ears with a gadget screwed to the back of his ears.

”Unfortunately Manjit was not able to move the bus far enough on this occasion,” Guinness World Records spokesperson Amarilla Espinoza said. ”He’s very disappointed, but that’s the nature of record-breaking.”

Earlier this year, Singh, from Leicester, succeeded in pulling a passenger aircraft weighing 7,4 tonnes a distance of 3,4m using his ears.

He already holds several other records, including one for pulling a double-decker bus with his hair, and another for lifting 85kg with his ears.

”He did offer to pull it with lots of other bits of his body, but we settled on his ears,” said Madalyn Bielfeld of Guinness World Records.

Singh’s record attempt in London’s Hyde Park was the first British event of World Records Day.

They included attempts to build the world’s highest stack of poppadoms, and complete a Bedlam cube, which is similar to a Rubik’s cube, in the fastest time.

Worldwide, record-breaking bids included efforts to make the world’s largest bra chain in South Africa, and to complete the most bungee jumps in 24 hours in Canada. — Sapa-dpa