A Guinness World record-breaking “half a mile long” dragon came to the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center in Kissimmee on Friday – not a dragon you’d likely see on Game of Thrones of course, it was a dragon consisting of 3.600 coloring pages created by school children for the Global Traditional Martial Arts. The display was set up in Gaylord Resort and Convention Center in Kissimmee and beat out the previous record that was created in Japan in 2021 with 3,166 pages.
Jeffrey Nodelman, CEO and 5th degree black belt, said the idea came from inclusivity. He wanted to get schools involved with something that every kiddo could participate in. Every child colored two different colors on a piece of paper. “It all starts with one colored paper. But it is a bigger than just coloring paper, it is a lesson of dedication and perseverance. You start with one and then watch it grow,” said Nodelman.
And grow it did! They had more than 9,100 colored papers flying in from all around the nation. Each one uniquely signed by the artist and each came with a donation to the H&L Hope Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing education and financial support to further the martial arts experience for students with special needs. Through this effort GTMA raised $20,000 towards H&L Hope.
Nodelman and team then got to the task of hanging 3,600 of those papers making sure each sheet touch the next 0r it wouldn’t have been dragon-like. On brand with martial arts, the GTMA staff made the sheets into 3,300 feet or over half a mile long dragon that wound the length of the exhibit hall at Gaylord Resort and Convention Center.
At 12:30 p.m. ET on July 8, the Guinness World Record officially named the GTMA dragon the world’s longest line of coloring paper! Congratulations to Global Traditional Martial Arts, all the kiddos who participated and to H&L Hope who receive the donation of $20,000. We’ll never look at dragons in the same way again!
Big shout out to Experience Kissimmee for giving Positively Osceola the heads up about the record-breaking dragon!
