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Five-year-old Axel Luchsinger was having a regular day at school, until an announcement came over the intercom system: He was officially a world-record breaker.
“Everyone was hugging me,” he told CBC News.
It turns out everyone’s favourite childhood toy is actually a record-breaking stair master — and not the type we collectively dread seeing at the gym. According to Guinness World Records, the record for the most stairs descended by a slinky has been shattered, at 53. They beat the previous achievement by 23 stairs.
And behind the feat are Axel and his parents, Joe and Christelle Luchsinger, a family of three from Connecticut.
Seemed ‘beatable’
Axel is “really interested in what is the biggest, fastest, strongest of everything,” Joe Luchsinger told CBC News.
He said his son recently became interested in slinkies and knew his dad had attempted to break records before, including a 20-hour practice run for longest handshake that unfortunately ended in a disqualification at the New York City event, when his friend lost consciousness.
So when they looked up the slinky record, the previous milestone of 30 stairs set in 2014 seemed “beatable.”
They purchased seven slinkies of different heights, diameters and springiness to find the right one. The winner: a plastic multicoloured variety.
Then in May 2025, the family went on a trip to visit Joe’s parents in Ohio. While there, he checked his maps app and found what he thought would be the perfect venue for the trick: a large dam with a “huge run of stairs.” But they soon found the steps were too big, and the slinky couldn’t make it down a single stair. So they scrambled for a backup.
What first came to mind, Joe said, was Ohio Stadium, but they couldn’t get in. Instead, he called up the athletic director at Otterbein University in Westerville, after having driven by and seeing a steep set of bleachers there. The director agreed to let them try it out, and that was where they cheered on the historic rainbow slinky descent.
Beating the storm
The team of three each had a job to do. Christelle was the designated launcher, Axel was the official stair counter and Joe was tasked with bringing the slinky back up after each run.
For a couple of hours, they threw the toy down the stairs repeatedly.
“Initially we’d only get runs of 10,” Joe said. “We almost gave up. There was a storm coming in, and we heard thunder in the distance.”
But their luck began to turn when Christelle started getting some longer runs in.
“At that point we were in it, and eventually one went all the way,” Joe said. “We barely beat the rain.”
A live adjudicator can verify records on the spot, but it was just the family present that day, who caught it on video in May 2025. They found out they had been certified for it over an email about 10 months later this past March.
Finding time to play
“Even though it might sound goofy, it’s pretty cool,” Christelle said of the record.
“Maybe one day we’ll make it to 150,” Axel said to his parents, with a grin and a giggle.
A total of 254 players came together Saturday to break the Guinness World Record for the largest game of human foosball. Organizers built a life-sized foosball arena in Etobicoke just for the event. It’s all part of a push to get fans excited for the FIFA World Cup 2026, which kicks off in Toronto in just 20 days.
For now, they’ve got their eyes on their next goal: the highest launch from a Galilean cannon, where one essentially drops several stacked balls of decreasing mass to see how high the lightest one on the top can bounce. The current record sits at 13.08 metres, set in March 2020.
In the meantime, Joe says it’s a good reminder that finding time to play as an adult is important.
“Though this is not a serious activity, we took it pretty seriously and it’s been sort of a magical thing,” he said.
“[We] have had a memorable experience doing something fun that [Axel] thought up.”
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