The Moustache World Championships
What sets hairy-faced people apart from the baby-faced masses? To find out we packed small rucksacks, minimal shaving foam and set course for the small town of Gründau-Lieblos, near Frankfurt. The decision was made the instant we found out about the World Beard and Moustache Championships (Bart Weltmeisterschaft).
With precious little facial hair between us, and not much else to go on, we decided to start growing our tashes and enter.
Waking up the morning of the competition in the car park we were surrounded by buses and vans from all over Europe. Twelve Italians spilled out of a Fiat, their moustaches and beards pressed flat from sleeping against the window. A team of French men in Gendarmie costume brushed their teeth with a bottle of Evian and a Swiss mountain man carrying a trail of hair down to his feet, sneaked a piss in a thorn bush. Moustache men are showy when it comes to physical appearance but they’re not flash when it comes to bedding down for the night, and the carpark at the championships might have been a cheap music festival, or worse, a rainbow gathering.
We were 150 contestants in all. Each champions from their own clubs and countries, men of immense standing. Prestigious dons who knew exactly what to do if you put a hairdryer and a can of hairspray in their hands. The collective wisdom in the styling room alone could match any catwalk collection in Milan or any dog show in Westminster. You might have found a split hair in the competition hall that Saturday but it would not have been attached to a competitor.
The atmosphere was friendly for a competition, probably because in Germany it’s hard to order a fluid for breakfast that doesn’t come in a bottle marked ‘6%’ or with‘pils’ on the label. But the cordial nature had a lot to do with a thing West Coast rappers refer to as ‘ghetto peace’. If you don’t know what heat your neighbours packing down his Carharts you choose your fights carefully. Similarly you think twice before you call a musketeer ‘soft’ if you’ve not determined whether his sword is plastic or lethal.
But it was a competition after all, and in order for winners to emerge, some losers would have to step forward. Stress levels were high. No one wants to grow a moustache for the best part of their adult life and be called a loser.
The German’s dominate all moustache sports. You look in the record books. All the way back to the seventies, when men started to look on their facial hair as something that could be marked out of ten, the Germans have been ranking first, second and third with the odd Swiss, French or Yankee stealing an unlikely place from under their noses.
To come to Germany and compete against them was a lot like picking a fight with a crocodile three foot under the water. It wasn’t just audacious, it was senseless. Wolfgang Schneider was going to be in attendance. He’d won the German Championships on seven occasions for his natural moustache. He’d been a world champ just once. He was hungry for another title and had spent the previous weeks in an Alpine gym where the fitness regimes were so tough they’re listed under ‘Jack Bauer’ in CIA torture handbooks. Wolfgang Schneider was in the shape of his life.
Also lining up to compete were heavyweights like Karl Heinz from Berlin. A competitor in the Kaiser category who’d only once turned up to compete and not finished first. Freestyle champion Bernd McElm arrived into the hall like an outlaw in an old west town that had long since given up guns for religion. His moustache dripped down his lips like treacle. The man didn’t know how to finish second. He doffed his cap to the room and his eyes popped bright like headlights. You could say what you like about the weather not turning up, but you couldn’t say dick about the line up. It was tougher than Nigerian hair.
In order to grow a good moustache you’ve got to be a survivor. Long as you can avoid an early death, chances are you’ll accumulate enough years to have something solid beneath your nose. The next skill, which is made redundant if you can’t master the first, is patience. No snake oil elixir or high protein diet can deliver quite as much growth as the strength of character to avoid the shears. Between us we had the guts of about six months growth. Plus a good summer had bleached our wings milky white.
There was no doubt in our mind that we had turned up to do battle, but we were far from confident in our choice of weapons.
In order to enter, it wasn’t enough for us to arrive unsolicited. We needed the authority of a higher structure. A club. Hence the birth of Club Ronnie. A club with a membership of two, with a pedigree you can trace back to all of five minutes ago.
“Club Ronnie?” One of the Dortmund contestants remarked,
“I haven’t heard of that club, we should really do something together.”
The audience at a moustache world championship deserve a mention. Apart from the usual moustache wags, women who when asked how they feel about beardy kisses give the reflex reply ‘men without facial hair, aren’t real men’, there are a number of camp followers. Two girls from Virginia have landed that morning. Chris and Laura.
“People who grow facial hair, do it for their own amusement or for the amusement of others,” says Chris before sliding back amongst a table of hairy men who wrap their arms around her. At another table two Italian girls have caught planes from Brescia to see the competition. “Men don’t grow moustaches in Italy,” they say in the same tone of voice Italians use when it rains in summer.
During our face-hair-growing period we’ve fallen upon the fifty percent of girls do like ’em statistic. We heard rumours of moustache fetish meeting in hired venues away from peeking eyes, but we never got to qualify them. At the world championships we came face to face with women driven wild with thoughts of hot wax and beard rash. Like kids in sweet shops. Some town in Virginia, plus a sleepy port next to Brescia will be getting their girls back in one piece, but they’ll never be the same girls again.
Upon registration a panel of elders decide which category your moustache suits: Natural, English, Dalí, Kaiser, Hungarian, Freestyle, Musketeer, Chinese and then the list descends into various shapes of beards named after bears and wooly mammoths. Depending on which category you’re assigned you can either use wax or not. We’re both put into the natural moustache category, which we’ll discover later is about as adventurous as your grandmother on a wet Tuesday evening.
Moustaches get judged out of ten by a panel made up of local hairdressers. Now, this might come across as sour grapes but when someone on what is ostensibly a beauty panel commits the cardinal sin of wearing white plastic shoes with black synthetic slacks, can you put much weight in their judgment?
On stage, contestants do a small lap then one by one introduce themselves to the jury, bowing to afford them a better look at what you’ve got growing on. In a world of plastic surgery and extravagant beauty, moustaches are to men what breast implants are to women. Bending over for the judges, you could say we’re giving them a good look at our cleavages. You shake what you’ve got for good measure. The judges raise their paddles to give us a mark out of ten with the lowest score being five. The championships may be competitive but they keep the bottom number at five. That’s as far as the mercy stretches.
Now I’m not going to tell you what numbers we clocked exactly, nor will I mention how many entrants were in our category but placing fifth and seventh in a group that included the president of the Handlebar Club, a previous Dalí winner and the undisputed heavyweight of the moustache world, Wolfgang Schneider, was something to be proud of. And besides, later on in the evening, once the champagne bar had been opened and drained, a couple of the judges admitted that they liked our on-stage presence best, but our lack of moustache experience held us back.
There’s a magic to moustache competitions. Maybe it’s the costume element or the fact that the person beside you looks like they’re trying to swallow a tarantula but you can’t help but believing that any minute, a horn will blast and our drinking buddies will march off on their warhorses to engage in combat on a battlefield floating somewhere between Switzerland and the Moon.
But they won’t be taking the Kaiser moustache winner with them. The poor man was so overcome by a rare German emotion that he broke down on stage and needed the touch of his wife to calm him.
“It’s been a dream for me my whole life,” he says, the tears rolling down his round cheeks and softening the waxy tips of his Kaiser.
“You can’t believe how hard it is,” he manages before his wife pulls him back to her bosom and signals that he’s had enough questions for the day.
And something clicks. These hairy men don’t always get an easy time of it. Marc, a Belgian competitor alluded to it over cheesecake. “People on their own are fine but if you get a group on a train or something they’ll start laughing,” he admits and then pierces the compote with a fork.
Far away from the comfort of the fine hall, a place where a Yeti might walk in and sit next to you and you’d not think twice about offering them a schnapps, these moustache world champions are oftentimes moustache freaks. Kids laugh at them and girls flick their waxy tips. If they’re on their own, in a new town, and not feeling so sure of themselves, their moustaches are sweet honey to a bully.
That’s something we learned when stumbling through the first weeks of bumfluff, there is absolutely no way to disguise a moustache. What can you do? Go round with a pint to your lips or sat behind a newspaper? A balaclava is the only foolproof way of hiding it and well, that brings a whole other world of unwanted attention. Sure some guys get to stuff the longer ends down their shirts and jackets but that still leaves enough hair sticking out to coat a tiger. In small towns where TV doesn’t penetrate prejudice, some of these men will have had it tough. The beer hall at the World Championships where men pet and tug at each other respectfully, while star struck ladies slip off their seats in excitement, is a safe place.
Yoddles break the constant purr of conversation in the hall as night approaches. It’s warm and contestants are mostly out of their heavy costumes and into civvies. Without the military insignia or the cavalier shirts, the men look like phonies in fake moustaches.
And to the sound of breaking glasses and roars of laughter, we slip out into the frost, shake the GPS to life and roll out onto the highway for home.
Conor Creighton
