Hungarians smell dirty tricks campaign as their bridge singled out for destruction before Canadian competition

Spaghetti bridges are meant to be broken – but not before the weight-supporting showdown event starts. An intricate pasta structure built by Hungarian students was mysteriously destroyed Friday, 5 March before the start of the 27th annual Spaghetti Bridge Building Contest at Okanagan College in Kelowna, a small city in the province of British Columbia on the chilly nation’s west coast.

Unsolved mystery

Malicious vandalism or an accident, no one could say for sure. Either way, the students were cheesed off to have come all the way from Budapest to Kelowna only to be robbed of the chance to compete in the contest.
“Our school spent a lot of money to have us come over here and try to win the event, and then this happens,” said Péter Tarrosi, 23, through a translator.
“We’re not sure if it was sabotaged or not,” said Norbert Schauer, 24. “All we know is we left the bridge where (contest organisers) told us to, assuming it would be safe, but it obviously wasn’t.”
The pair, from Budapest’s Technical University, were one of three Hungarian teams to compete in this year’s event. Other teams from the institution have won several previous competitions at Okanagan College.
About 9am, contest organisers told the teams competing in the crowd-pleasing heavyweight division – in which progressive weight is applied to the spaghetti bridges until they break apart – to leave their creations in a back corner on the stage in the theatre where the event was held.

Amazing discovery

When Tarrosi and Schauer returned a few hours later to get ready for the 1pm competition, they learned their bridge had been broken. It was the only one that was destroyed.
It wasn’t possible to fix the bridge, on which the pair had worked almost non-stop since arriving in Kelowna the Monday before the event to get ready for the competition.
“We’d worked on building it with only a few hours sleep each night,” Tarrosi said. “It was very upsetting to see it was destroyed before the competition.”
Contest organiser Michelle Lowry, who handles public relations for Okanagan College, said she believes the destruction of the Hungarians’ bridge was an “unfortunate accident.”

Secret stays behind the curtain

The heavyweight bridges were on the floor in a dark part of the theatre stage, behind a curtain, and Lowry believes someone accidentally stepped on the Hungarians’ bridge.
“I feel awful about what happened, but I don’t think it was intentionally destroyed,” Lowry said.
The competition attracted two other teams from Hungary, as well as one from Iran, in addition to students from around the province.
Asked if the spaghetti bridges might not have been stored in a more secure area where they couldn’t be accidentally stepped on, particularly given the time, effort and expense put into participating in the competition by the foreign teams, Lowry said: “This is a lesson learned. We can’t change the past, but we can do better in the future.”
Another Hungarian team, Roland Erdõsi and Peter Sandor, won the competition. Their spaghetti bridge supported a weight of 255 kilograms before breaking.

– The Daily Courier

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