Slingshots, Shopping Carts, General Mayhem
By CBSNews.com's Christine Lagorio.
Five men, naked save for black Speedo-style underwear, were engrossed in an impromptu dance-off on a Brooklyn street corner when they noticed five men in blue surgical scrubs sneering at them.
"You guys have no shame!" one of the doctors hollered.
The groups of costumed men exchanged expletives until the doctors retreated to their shopping cart.
The dancers were not deterred, though they might have been cold in the 30-degree weather. This was no time for shame. These men were self-proclaimed idiots and this was the Idiotarod.
In its annual New York City race, this parody of Alaska's famed Iditarod sent its hundreds of participants on a snaking course through streets of two city boroughs Saturday. Instead of dog sleds, there were shopping carts. Teams of humans — usually elaborately costumed — pull, push or ride the carts to a series of checkpoints — usually at bars — and to its end, where the first across the finish line is by no means the winner.
Over the four years of the Idiotarod's New York life, it has become less a race and more of a madcap roving food fight. Sabotage is the name of the game, and when members of teams are dressed as devils, Kim Jong Il or the Noid (formerly of Domino's Pizza fame), it seems to come naturally.
The race began with a rush of carts from a lot in Greenpoint, just north of one of Brooklyn's trendiest neighborhoods, Williamsburg. From there, it was a mad dash to the first checkpoint, where some teams diligently whipped out their paperwork and waited in line to get a go-ahead, and others staked out street corners and waited for passing teams to cream with eggs, raw fish, flour, pepperoni and every condiment imaginable.
The G.I. Joes were one such team. In a break from pelting fellow racers with eggs, Dave Vendley, who said he runs a restaurant in SoHo, told CBSNews.com, "We're like the ultimate in sabotage. Our motto is 'take no prisoners.'"
At this point — a solid five minutes into the race — the teammates' head-to-toe camouflage more resembled the look of a middle school home economics class gone awry. This is precisely why they chose the camo.
"Last year our theme didn't work so well with sabotage," said Vendley's teammate Rebecca Martey, a 27-year-old graduate student. "So this year we went with the American military."
A team called Fishstick Breakfast went a step further in their preparation for sacking other teams — and being hit.
Other teams were more innocuous, such as one comprised of five girls dressed as unicorns, who justified their choice by explaining: "Unicorns are unique and magical creatures!"
Team Cosby wore dark-hued multicolored sweaters, a la The Cosby Show. Their schtick included chanting "Hey hey hey, its Fat Albert!" and flinging Jello at passing carts.
The route wound to a northern tip of Brooklyn and across a bridge to Queens. Some teams, going for speed (although only the fourth, fifth and sixth teams to cross the finish line would be awarded prizes), found tough competition.
Watch the Idiotarod on film at YouTube.
"We were going over the bridge and we heard a group scream 'avoid the Noid!' behind us," said a Noid member, 26-year-old Henry Rosenbaum. "We turned and saw Kim Jong-Il there, and they had bottles of fish oil. I got hit. Bad."
Others seemed impervious to all the chaos. A Borat-inspired team, Jagshemash, was found whooping and galloping around their cart,
Planning for this mass mayhem is serious business. Last year's winners, Team Cobra (infamous for their fire-breathing cobra cart, large 20-plus person team and of course, the all-but-mandatory stealth sabotage tactics), were entrusted to coordinate this year's race. They ran check-in, manned checkpoints and dealt with the large police presence. They text-messaged instructions to the teams and occasionally cared for over-intoxicated participants.
For teams, too, creating a spectacle takes a huge effort. Team Avoid The Friggin' Noid's team leader, Adam Duerson, designed and sewed his 11 teammates' costumes on his days off from work over the last two months.
"I've been planning this literally since the end of last year's race," Duerson said. "And 90 percent of what I put into this was out of spite for Team Cobra."
Perhaps he earned some sense of revenge when his younger brother — who flew to New York from Milwaukee for the Idiotarod — instigated duct-taping a member of Team Cobra to a wooden pole. Duerson then dumped a vat of cheese puffs over the victim's head.
And some joy was had by others due to the Noid's sabotage — or at least due to the general mayhem of the day. Dave Reynolds, a member of a team called Quit Beastin', saw the Noids get revenge on Kim Jong-Il.
"The best part of my day was seeing a Noid with a North Korean flag," Reynolds said.
By Christine Lagorio