A Yale neuroscience resident, his wife, and their 5-year-old son have officially entered the Guinness World Records — for sending a plastic Slinky down 53 stairs at a college football stadium in Ohio.
The certificate, confirmed this month, recognizes Joe Luchsinger, MD, PhD, his wife Christelle, and their son Axel for the most stairs descended by a Slinky in a single uninterrupted run. The mark of 53 steps obliterates the previous record of 30, set years earlier.
A Five-Year-Old's Question That Started a Quest
The Luchsingers' attempt began the way many record runs do: with a curious kid. "Axel is at the age where everything needs to be the biggest, fastest, or most extreme version of itself," Joe Luchsinger told Yale School of Medicine. "He'd recently discovered slinkies and knew I had attempted a world record before, so naturally he wanted to know the record for most stairs descended by a slinky."
When they looked it up and saw the existing mark was 30, "it seemed beatable."
The family tested seven different Slinkies of varying length, width, and flexibility before settling on a Liberty Imports 6-inch Jumbo Rainbow Coil Spring — a plastic Slinky measuring 6.2 inches across. (Guinness rules require the toy be commercially available, ruling out custom builds.)
The Real Challenge Was the Stairs
Luchsinger said the trickiest part wasn't the Slinky — it was finding the right staircase. A long, uninterrupted descent with no landings and just the right step depth-to-height ratio turns out to be surprisingly rare.
Their first location, an old Ohio dam with stairs they'd scouted on Google Maps, turned out to be a bust. "The stairs were so wide the slinky couldn't clear a single step," Luchsinger said. "Axel was devastated."
Driving around Columbus while visiting family, Luchsinger spotted what looked like ideal bleachers at a local college. He called the athletic director at Otterbein University with what he called "probably the strangest request of his week." The director kindly arranged for staff to open the stadium, and on May 14, 2025, the family had two hours of access to attempt the record at Otterbein Stadium in Westerville, Ohio.
"We nearly gave up early on because we were struggling to get any momentum," Luchsinger said. "But once we pushed through that wall the long runs started coming."
Guinness then took about ten months to verify the footage, measure the stairs, and confirm the record before issuing the certificate this spring.
A Family Project Powered by Gravity
The winning bleachers, it turns out, had nearly perfect physics: tightly spaced, evenly proportioned, and continuous enough to let a coil keep rolling end-over-end without snagging. Once the Slinky reached cruising rhythm, gravity did the rest.
Luchsinger, who works as a resident in the Neuroscience Research Training Program at Yale's Department of Psychiatry, says the experience was less about the toy and more about engineering a perfect run. "I never look at stairs the same way anymore," he joked.
Small Victory, Big Joy
The Slinky record won't change the world. It won't cure a disease, save a species, or solve a great mystery of science. But it does represent something quietly important: a parent saying "yes" to a kid's wild question, scouting unlikely venues across a state, sweet-talking a college athletic director, and spending a Wednesday afternoon perfecting a plastic toy's descent through a sun-soaked stadium.
For Axel Luchsinger, age five, that's now a permanent line in the official Guinness World Records book — and a story he'll get to tell, with photographic proof, for the rest of his life. Not bad for one summer afternoon and a $15 rainbow Slinky.
