There are so many flavors of coffee competition, and I love them all deeply. There’s your Barista Championships and Brewers Cup, your Coffee In Good Spirits and Roasters Championship, the Latte Art Championship and its more DIY party vibe sibling the Throwdown. You’ve got Coffee Masters, the Barista League, and Crush the Rush, each testing a different aspect of being a coffee professional. I love them all so much that I’ve taken to the deeply nerdy thing of crunching the numbers on some of these competitions; it’s very inside baseball and I’m not entirely proud of it, but it is who I am.
The point is: coffee competitions are fun, and if you, the spectator, allow yourself the freedom to get wrapped up in it, you too will have fun. So you can imagine my excitement—and soon to be yours as well—when I learned of a barista race in Paris. The Course des Cafes is a two-kilometer race where baristas must carry a tray with a coffee and croissant, without losing any of its contents.
As reported by CNN, the race has quite a long history, going back to 1914, though one had not been held in 12 years due to budget constraints. But with Paris to host the 2024 Olympics this summer, Course des Cafes was revived on Sunday, March 24th “to promote sport and the excellence of French service.”
The rules are fairly simple: participants must complete the 2km (roughly 1.2 miles) course carrying a tray that contains a cup of coffee, a glass of water, and a croissant as quickly as they can without spilling; “any change to the composition of their tray would impact their final score,” per CNN. They must wear the traditional Parisian barista attire: a white dress shirt, black pants, and a black apron. The rules don’t expressly ban having a cheeky cigarette, which I guess most other competitions don’t either, but its omission feels particularly noteworthy and Parisian given the context.
Described more as a speed walk than a run—which if you’ve ever seen a professional speed walker you know can still be quite quick—the fastest baristas in this year’s event crossed the finish line in under 14 minutes, without spilling. For their speed and precision, the winners, Pauline Van Wymeersch of Café le Petit Pont and Samy Lamrous of La Contrescarpe earned themselves tickets to this summer’s Olympic Opening Ceremonies.
We need more silly good-time coffee competitions like this one. Maybe a milk jug carry, where the competitor who carries the most one-gallon milk jugs over a 10-meter distance the fastest wins. Or how about a concentration test, where baristas have to memorize as much of a chatty customer’s nonsense while trying to make a cappuccino? Or cooler hide and seek, with the winner being the person who was able to sneak off to the walk-in freezer the longest without being noticed. You make any of these competitions and I will personally come and cover the event myself.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
