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Do you sometimes get the urge to settle scores with your computer equipment by throwing it out of the window? Then you might want to enter this unlikely competition, which takes place every year in Germany.
Germany isn’t just home to OktoberFest and Rammstein: every year, IT professionals from all over the world get together to throw servers as far as they can. And it’s an official competition, growing in popularity every year.
Server throwing, a European discipline
Before it became a ‘sport’, server tossing was mainly a way for storage professionals and system administrators to channel their frustration at temperamental infrastructures. The discipline was born in Dutch data centres in the early 2010s, when the cloud was developing rapidly. At the time, it was a bit like Fight Club: the first rule was to keep the practice quiet.
Life The flight attendant disappears mid-flight, only to be found naked in the airplane’s bathroom.
But time passed and, eventually, the World Server Throwing Association (WSTA) was born to “introduce this intense underground sport to the general public”. And so, every year, the Cloud Fest held in Rust, Germany, becomes the setting for the World Server Throwing Championship over the course of a weekend.
In practical terms, each participant has two attempts to launch a server, generally a 1U rack-mount, as far as possible. The best distance of the two is then chosen.
Performances applauded by the public
Two competitions are held at the same time: one for men, the other for women, so there’s no jealousy! In 2025, the title went to Thom van Hal, who propelled his server to 13.18 metres, surpassing the favourites Bartosz ‘The Beast’ Wojciak, winner of the 2024 edition, and Dierk ‘The Machine’ Zienicke. On the women’s side, Linda Splitt won with a throw of 11.10 metres.
The icing on the cake is that the German competition has inspired other countries, and a veritable international circuit is gradually being set up. Next October, the MSP Global trade show in Barcelona, Spain, will host another event dedicated to server launches, and the CloudFest USA 2025 in Miami in November will do the same. All that remains is to make it an Olympic discipline, and we’ll have come full circle. And in the meantime, practitioners of this extreme sport (especially for servers) recommend a muscular workout based on squats and sit-ups to become a pro at rack throwing.
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Source : https://www.cloudfest.com/world-server-throwing-championship
