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The Portland Adult Soapbox Derby: An Appreciation

By Zach Dundas • on August 26, 2009

The pit zone of last weekend’s Portland Adult Soapbox Derby offered many diversions, as the annual gravity-powered race/art happening attracted its traditional mob of beer-powered spectators, competitors and born daredevils to Mount Tabor’s humble (but, at speed, treacherous) volcanic cone. My two-year-old sat in the cockpit of a white, torpedo-shaped doom wagon called Gravity Slave, as the Slave’s crew nursed 11 o’clock beers, looked on with amused indulgence and perhaps considered signing the boy to their youth team. A car constructed from wobbly wine barrels rumbled toward the starting line like a war chariot from an alternative past. A team of skinny-panted, black-clad rockabillians from Vancouver hustled a coffin-shaped car towards its destiny. In terms of absurd pageantry, sartorial insanity and sheer whacked-out sense of occasion, the Adult Soapbox Derby has few rivals.

As I wandered the pit and the serpentine curve of the racecourse, I also realized that the Derby upends just about every piece of received wisdom about what sports are supposed to be.

Americans love sports, sure. That love sometimes seems as stricture-laden as a Puritan marriage. Our sports are supposed to make money—when the budgetary scythe swings through a collegiate athletic department, woe to the financially marginal “fringe” sport. We celebrate sports as a forum for competitive excellence and obsessively honed proficiency. If they’re not making money or opening new frontiers of human physical achievement (with/without drugs—whatever), our sports must at least provide self-improvement. Sports help us lose weight. Sports enhance our abdomens. Against all evidence supplied by the NFL’s police blotter or Major League Baseball’s biochemistry, we still look to sports to build character among our young men and women.

In short, we want sports to be good for us. How perverse. How dull. Thankfully, the Portland Adult Soapbox Derby does not subscribe to this corseted outlook.

Riding down a steep slope in a homemade, wheel-mounted box built to resemble the van from The A-Team—to cite just one vivid example from last Saturday—may be many things. It may be fun. It may be stupid. It may look cool, or ridiculous, depending on the beholders’ own sensibilities. One thing such a deed is not is very useful. The act demonstrates no standard excellence, testifies to no particular competitive zeal. Tiger Woods would never do this. And therein lies the brilliance of the Adult Soapbox Derby: the Derby does not pretend to matter. It simply exists.

In contrast to the big-money world of “real” sports, the Derby is free for spectators and actually forbids competitors from spending much money. An event that requires huge amounts of volunteer labor and logistical maneuvering can’t be dismissed as a tossed-off frolic. At the same time, an event that has not yet bothered to post race results from this year—or from last year, or the year before that—on its official website can’t be accused of taking itself too seriously. Or even slightly seriously.

Yes, someone won, but the Derby’s not about that. The Derby—brace yourself, sports fans, because after 43 Super Bowls, this concept could blow your minds—is about fun. The Derby is about wandering down the hill between heats and running into people you know. The Derby is about drinking beer in front of your kids. The Derby is about looking out over the city of Portland and rediscovering its native genius for quirk. The Derby is what happens when creativity meets a certain studied stupidity at the border of adventure and idleness.

Other sports events—“real” sports events—stomp into our lives, bellowing about their own importance. The Portland Adult Soapbox Derby glances at these events as it barrels down the volcano, and laughs.