Wicked Sheets, Girl Scouts, & a Bed Race
What happens when a partnership between a bedding company, the Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana, and Boilermaker Local 40 comes to fruition? The best entry for the Kentucky Derby Festival’s annual Great Bed Races, that’s what!
Wicked Sheets has sponsored the team. Our race vehicle is dubbed the Wicked Blurr. The annual Great Bed Races feature teams muscling custom-made, wheeled beds around a narrow, indoor figure-8 course. Our race crew includes a driver and four pushers. The “track” is Broadbent Arena’s unbanked concrete floor.
All of the race beds are scratch built to specifications supplied by race officials. Though this event is in partnership with the Kentucky Derby Festival, most contestants (ourselves included) admit their machines lack the grace and speed of fleet thoroughbreds in the Kentucky Derby. The first leg of the Triple Crown, the storied horse race, is on for May 7.
Once Wicked Sheets and the Girl Scouts realized we didn’t have the means to build the bed, we enlisted the help of Elizabethtown’s Boilermakers Local 40. They bought a pair of identical bikes for parts, attached the wheels to welded steel tubing, and added a steering mechanism. All told, the bed weights about 300 pounds.
The ponies run for the roses, bed racers for the cones. The object is to miss the rubbery orange markers that form the figure 8. While racers get penalized for knocking over cones or getting out of your lane, there is an award given at race end for the highest number of displaced cones.
“All five of us will be dressed up to look like Girl Scout cookies,” Alli said with a laugh. “We will also be wearing ‘highly aerodynamic’ capes made from Wicked Sheets. Hopefully the sheets will give us an edge on the competition. Plus, our sheets seem like a natural fit for this event.” Alli is a former Brownie Scout herself.
The Girl Scout cookie program is the largest entrepreneurial organization for young women in the country and Wicked Sheets is glad to support them.
The green flag falls at 7 p.m., local time, at the Broadbent Arena in Louisville. We’ll see you there!
