Rubber duck#Races
A duck race is a carnival -like event in which swim a few thousand rubber ducks on a mostly urban rivers to the bet. Most organized fund-raising, these ducks are provided with numbers and allows participants to use to adopt a duck for a small amount of money and winning money or prizes in victory or good placement of the duck.
The proceeds from the acquisition of ducks flows into the work of organizing non-profit organization. In legal terms, is a duck race in Germany a lottery.
The first duck race was held in 1987 in Ottawa instead. In the 1990s the duck race spread through the industrialized world. They are assumed to be original form of fundraising in which the duck as a popular figure occurs also for the organizers. Compared to other forms of lottery, however, a duck race attracts a considerable organizational burden. Partial fear organizers already risks, because the duck race would omnipresent. They are also controversial for environmental reasons, as in ducks race to be sunk thousands of plastic objects in a body of water, not all of which are fished out of the river.
The size of the race is different than average give organizers organization 3,000 ducks. The currently the world 's largest duck race was held as a Great British Duck Race on 31 August 2008 on the River Thames in London with 250,000 participating blue rubber ducks instead. The organizers strucked her last year's record of 165,000 yellow ducks. Germany's largest duck race was held in 2001 in Cologne, Germany with 50,000 ducks instead of on the Fühlinger lake. The race in the Trier -Saarbrücken - Schweich got to be one of 365 projects an award by the initiative of Germany - Land of Ideas.
In Germany were held in 2008 at least 51 Duck Race. The number of viewers is usually between a few hundred to 80,000. The ducks themselves will be increasingly to special constructions. A duck race is characterized among other things by a very flat bottom and a small metal weight to stabilize. They also have no Quietschventil. These are now numbered not only continuously available, but can also be hired in large numbers. At the Great British Duck Race, the organizers put an unusual blue ducks since 2008, instead of the traditional yellow, as it always come back to fraud, in which viewers had their ducks in a good position brought privately to water.