World Beer Mile Competition Rocked To Its Core Over Seismic Rule Change

World Beer Mile Competition Rocked By Controversial Bottle Ban

Beer Mile Media


There are plenty of people out there who use running as an excuse to crack open a beer or two, and while the jury is still out on whether or not it does more harm than good when it comes to muscle recovery, it never hurts to have a fizzy reward you can use as motivation when the miles start to take their toll.

Of course, most people usually wait until the end of their workout to treat themselves to a brew for reasons that should be fairly obvious if you’ve ever tried to drink a beer while jogging. With that said, there are certainly exceptions—including a guy who never failed to make a pit stop at a bar where I used to watch the New York Marathon in order to pound a pint of Narragansett around seven miles into the race before heading back onto the streets.

There are also plenty of people who’ve combined those two passions to participate in an event that somehow hasn’t been featured on ESPN2 when the network transforms into The Ocho: the Beer Mile.

For the uninitiated, a “beer mile” involves running four laps around a standard track and stopping to consume a 12 oz. beer with a minimum ABV of 5% between each loop while attempting to record the fastest overall time.

The concept was first dreamed up by a crew of Canadians who hosted the first competition all the way back in 1989, and it’s since become a fairly serious discipline governed by a strict and exhaustive set of rules that have evolved over the decades—including a recent change that has rocked the Beer Mile community to its core.

The Beer Mile World Classic has some controversy on its hands after banning bottles and forcing competitors to switch to cans

Last year, Corey Bellmore broke the world record he set in 2017 when he posted a time of 4:28 at the annual Beer Mile World Classic (while he’d crossed the finish line four seconds quicker the previous year, that achievement was voided when he suffered a “reversal of fortune” after being unable to keep the liquid down).

Bellmore was among the group of runners who headed to Leuven, Belgium to compete in the 2022 event on October 15th, and while he was technically able to set a new record, he was unable to surpass last year’s mark thanks to a controversial tweak to the rules that banned runners from drinking beer from bottles and forced them to exclusively chug from cans.

 

According to Food and Wine, the change (which stemmed from a ban on glass at the track where the heats were held) had a fairly noticeable impact on overall times due to the impact cans had on ease of consumption; Bellmore, who set the “Can Beer Mile World Record” with a time of 4:49, lost a few seconds when he struggled to get the can open ahead of his final lap (it’s also worth noting competitors are banned from shotgunning or similarly untraditional methods). 

Beer Mile’s “Chief Chug Officer” Chris Robertson told the outlet the switch definitely had a detrimental impact on speed but noted cans were the norm until bottles were first permitted at a competition in 2014.

It’s unclear if this will remain the default going forward or if the World Classic will adjust the standards on a venue-to-venue basis, but if the former ends up being the case, I don’t think it’s too dramatic to suggest we’re entering the beer mile equivalent of the Dead Ball Era.

Connor Toole avatar and headshot for BroBible
Connor Toole is the Deputy Editor at BroBible. He is a New England native who went to Boston College and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Frequently described as "freakishly tall," he once used his 6'10" frame to sneak in the NBA Draft and convince people he was a member of the Utah Jazz.