A German waterpark opened up the first standing waterslide, and people quite naturally had a lot of concerns about it.
Normally when you go to a waterpark, you would expect most of the waterslides to be enjoyed either on a big rubber ring or on your butt.
Being enclosed in tubes a lot also have funky light shows on their interior to entertain or spook you on the way down, all very good fun.
But someone decided to ask the question of what if you could all that, but standing up?
And so the weird idea of the standing waterslide came into being.
If you’re wondering what a standing waterslide would look like, or how it would even work, let me paint a picture.
Remember as a child when you were wearing socks on a polished wooden floor?
You could take a run up and then stop and slide on your socks and see how far you can go before you stop. Well, it’s basically like that but you just keep on going.
There are two standing slides at the park, one indoor and one outside.
The indoor standing slide is for beginners (YouTube/TUBERIDES)
The indoor slide is called the Sauerland Surfer, and is described on the website as a ‘beginner standing slide’.
This one curls around the pool in a short course, which you can use to get the gist of how to ride a standing slide.
But then we get to the larger one, the Crazy Surfer, which is over 100m long and spirals around outside the pool.
People had a lot of concerns after seeing clips of people riding the slides and took to social media to share them.
One wrote: “All I think is knee injury,” while a second posted: “I’ve been on one of those and I fell and it hurt so bad.”
Meanwhile a third commented: “Sometimes there’s a reason why nobody has done it before.”
The larger standing slide, in red (YouTube/TUBERIDES)
And that’s not it at the waterpark either, with another waterslide seeming to be a regular lying down one, with one difference.
That’s because the beginning of this slide, called Green Kick, sees you being shut into a little chamber that looks like a stasis pod on a science fiction spaceship.
Once you have your arms crossed over your chest, as though you’re in a coffin, to make sure they’re close in to you. You press a button, a countdown starts – and the floor drops from under you.
This sends you plummeting into the slide over the pool and other bathers.
Not one for the faint-hearted!