There it remained until the noughties, when a new generation picked up the artefact and twisted it back into vogue. Illustration: Alana Holmberg/The Guardian The media wrote obituaries – in 1986 the New York Times declared it “retired to the attic, the garbage heap”.įeliks Zemdegs at his home in Melbourne. Even the converted consigned it to relic status. But the obsession with the equal parts alluring and exasperating contraption fizzled almost as soon as it started, and by the mid-1980s the pastime was considered passé. Books explaining how to solve it flooded the market. Invented by Hungarian architect Ernő Rubik in 1974, its initial craze lasted several years, a period during which about 100 million authorised cubes had been sold and many millions more cheap knock-offs. This is the Rubik’s Cube’s second coming. “That has really played out … the popularity has just completely exploded.” “The way that it was pitched to me by dad and others was that if I did it, it would raise the profile of speed cubing and more people will get into it,” he says. As fans lined up for autographs, he didn’t get what all the fuss was about. This has occurred over the course of a decade since 2010 when, as a 14-year-old Melbourne school student, Zemdegs completed the three-layer configuration in a world-record time of 6.77 seconds and suddenly found himself under such a glaring spotlight that his parents became his default media managers. So fast, in fact, that all of his records have been broken (his personal best is still a cool 4.16 seconds). “I’m gradually, not so much getting slow, but there’s a lot of kids who are getting really, really fast.” “The truth is I am extreme veteran,” he says. Now, at 25 and with a career in finance, he is winding down. In the blue riband event, the 3x3x3, he has broken his own record 13 times, and thus been crowned the Usain Bolt of cubing. When used for sport every millisecond counts and Zemdegs, over the course of his career, has held 121 world records across the 3x3x3, 4x4x4, 5x5x5, 2x2x2, one-handed 3x3x3, 6圆圆, 7x7x7, and blindfolded 4x4x4 categories.
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