Who Invented the Ice Bucket Challenge?

Who Invented the Ice Bucket Challenge?

Participants take part in the World Record Ice Bucket Challenge at Etihad Stadium on Aug. 22 in Melbourne, Australia. Over 700 people took part in setting the new world record.

“Where does a phenomenon begin?”

That’s the question ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi seeks to answer in a long SportsCenterfeature on the ice bucket challenge, which has reportedly raised more than $50 million for ALS charities in less than a month. Rinaldi says that it began “with one name”: Pete Frates. A former Boston College baseball player, Frates was diagnosed with ALS in 2011. On July 31 of this year, he challenged some friends and celebrities (including NFL quarterbacks Tom Brady and Matt Ryan) to take the ice bucket challenge to “strike out ALS.” As my Slate colleague Will Oremus pointed out, various outlets have since claimed that Frates invented or inspired the challenge, with the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, and MLB.com joining ESPN in labeling Frates as the stimulus for the chilly, charitable fad.

This origin myth, while heartwarming, just isn’t true. The real story of how the ice bucket challenge came to dominate your Facebook feed takes nothing away from Frates’ inspirational message, or the fact that his personal struggle helped draw celebrities to the cause and drive charitable contributions. But focusing on “one name” obscures another fascinating tale, one that illustrates how movements mutate and evolve as they travel across the Web.

People have been getting wet and cold for charity for a very long time. “Polar bear plunges,” in which people willingly fling themselves into frigid bodies of water, are held all around the world, with Boston’s annual event dating back to at least 1904. There’s also a proud tradition of dumping buckets of liquid on people’s heads, with the Gatorade shower emerging as a canonical NFL celebration sometime in the mid-1980s.

So, who thought to combine charitable coldness with bucket-enabled dousing? Settle in, because this is a circuitous tale.

In his Aug. 12 Slate piece, Oremus says the challenge “came from a dare that was circulating among a group of pro athletes, including golfer Greg Norman and motorcycle racer Jeremy McGrath.” Indeed, pro golfers were pouring cold water all over themselves back in June. The Golf Channel’s Jason Sobel explains that Chris Kennedy, a golfer on a minor-league circuit in Florida, was the first, on July 14, to focus the freezing fundraiser on ALS research.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpJCWjs6kYA

Kennedy’s challenge found its way to Pat Quinn, who like Pete Frates has been diagnosed with ALS. Quinn, who has also been credited with creating the ice bucket challenge, brought the charitable splash-fest to his Quinn for the WinFacebook page, where it then reached Frates and rocketed to social media supremacy.

The golfers, though, didn’t instigate this bucket brigade. Three weeks before Chris Kennedy poured water on himself for ALS research, a motocross racer named Jeff Northrop issued an ice bucket challenge of his own on Instagram to raise money for his nephew’s medical problems. If you search for the hashtag #icebucketchallenge on Instagram, you’ll find a huge number of examples that precede that.

The earliest #icebucketchallenge I found on Instagram is this one, posted on May 29 by a user named standupguy06:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/08/who_invented_the_ice_bucket_challenge_a_slate_investigation.html

But that’s a trip down another icy cul-de-sac. The real ancestor of water-dumping often eschewed the bucket entirely. The “cold water challenge” and the “24-hour ice challenge,” both of which traveled widely across social media earlier this year, were variants on the classic polar bear plunge. In this iteration of the challenge, participants had to submerge themselves in a vat, tub, or body of freezing water. (The “24-hour” part references the requirement to complete the challenge in a day’s time.) This version was particularly popular with firefighters, with a recentarticle in the Columbus Dispatch pegging charitably inclined fire departments as the likely origin of this frosty frenzy.

Or maybe not. The site Know Your Meme claims the cold water challenge “began as a fundraising campaign in March of 2014, for Madi Rogers, a toddler from Grundy County, Tennessee suffering from severe juvenile diabetes.” According to a local TV station, Tennesseans raised money to buy young Madi a service dog by filming themselves jumping into freezing water and putting the videos on Facebook. Know Your Meme found one such video that dates back to March 8.