Jelle's Marble Runs

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About

Jelle's Marble Runs is the YouTube channel of Jelle Bakker, a Dutch marble enthusiast who grew popular staging races and competitions between numerous marbles. The channel presents races and competitions as part of a "Marblelympics" (a portmanteau of "marble" and "Olympics"), dubbing the competitions with English commentary and filling in canned crowd noise over an audience of marbles.

History

Bakker first joined YouTube on December 16th, 2006.^[1] For several years, he posted videos related to marbles and interesting courses for marble runs. On May 31st, 2013, he surpassed 1,000 subscribers.^[2] In April of 2016, his videos began seeing national attention once he began adopting a mock-competition style for his videos. In particular, a video featuring marbles racing through a course made in sand gained the attention of Mental Floss,^[3] Deadspin^[4] and the BBC.^[5] A remastered version of the video is shown below. Commentary is provided by Greg Woods.

The channel had gained over 400,000 subscribers^[1] before it was accidentally deleted in November of 2018,^[6] causing Bakker to start a new channel where he has been reuploading old videos.^[7] As of February 5th, 2019, the new channel has over 200,000 subscribers. The channel's most popular video to date with over 3.3 million views is the 2019 qualifier for the Marbleympics (shown below). Since then, the channel has also been featured in the 2019 and 2020 airings of ESPN's ESPN8: The Ocho.

Coronavirus Resurgence

The 2019-20 Coronavirus Outbreak led to the cancellation of many sporting events and seasons, which in turn led people to look elsewhere for sporting entertainment as part of the Day 1 Without Sports meme. One of the most popular iterations of this was posted by Twitter user @davdchristmas, who posted a clip from Jelle's Marble Runs and gained over 220,000 retweets and 750,000 likes (shown below). This led to articles in TIME^[11] and Nerdist^[12] about the effectiveness of Jelle's Marble Runs as quarantine entertainment.

Day 4 with no sports:

Marble1 racing is intense! pic.twitter.com/StgO4fY8VG

— CH𓂀IS☥MAS (@davdchristmas) March 15, 2020

Online Presence

In addition to the channel's YouTube presence, Jelle's Marble Runs has over 43,000 likes on Facebook,^[8] 5,000 Instagram subscribers^[10] and a self-maintained Wiki^[9] which has the stats and mock-stories behind each marble.

Treadmill Racing refers to a series of YouTube, TikTok and Instagram videos in which toy cars and other object race against each other on a constantly running treadmill, with the person filming also commenting on the race. Started by a series of viral videos posted in 2020, the trend was then popularized by several YouTube and TikTok channels launched in 2021.