After Ben Hur, They Just Had to Race Chariots

I felt motivated thinking about the upcoming holiday, so this morning I mowed the lawn to a glorious green sheen. Then I picked up last night’s WSJ and read about chariot racing, an ancient sport that is making a comeback. Matt Moffett wrote a story with a Sao Simao, Brazil dateline.

It all started, the story said, with Ben Hur. On two different continents, men watched this 11-Oscar epic and decided they wanted to race. Just like Ben did, flying around the Circus Maximus on two-wheeled horse-drawn chariots.

Luiz Augusto Alves de Oliviera is one of these men, he is a sugar-cane farmer in central Brazil. He’s built a race course on his ranch and has big plans to expand beyond his thinly populated state and bring big crowds to a new course in a bigger town , Cravinhos. His racing career began after he was laid up after a motorcycle accident, and watched Ben Hur over and over again, inspiring him after he recovered to build an aluminum chariot.

In Sweden, another man shared his vision. Stellan Lind got financial backing from the Jordan Tourism Board to hold re-enactments of Roman chariot races in a hippodrome in Jerash. He even found a prop man who worked on the movie and borrowed a chariot he had stored in Rome to use in a race.

The sport is big. Big! More than 300,000 spectators jammed the Stade-de-France last September when director Robert Hossein “staged five performances of a $17 million Ben Hur re-enactment, with hundreds of extras appearing as charioteers, gladiators and pirates….the sports appeal was no mystery to Romans. Fans often would camp out the night before a race at the Circus Maximus, which held 250,000, to get a good seat.”