‘It’s never too late to live your best life’: Pauline Kana, who is 100 years young. Photograph: Bradley Meinz/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘It’s never too late to live your best life’: Pauline Kana, who is 100 years young. Photograph: Bradley Meinz/The Guardian Experience Older people Experience: I became the world’s oldest crowd surfer at 99 After retiring at 83, I had a new lease of life creating social media content with my grandson. Then I broke the crowd surfing world record
Prefer the Guardian on Google I n 2013, aged 87, I was playing basketball with my grandson Ross in Ohio while he was home from college. He made a video of me blocking his shot, posted it online, and people really ate it up. We started doing comedy skits together and now have more than 4 million followers on Instagram.
After doing lots of short videos, we decided to make a documentary about my life. As part of it, we compiled my bucket list. One of the things I wanted to do was break a world record. Ross and I spent months thinking of something that would be outrageous, but also fun and inclusive. We settled on me becoming the world’s oldest crowd surfer.
Ross knows the country singer Brantley Gilbert, and he was willing to help us at a show he was playing in Bellville, Texas. Originally, during the crowd surfing, I was going to be strapped to a board Ross had made to protect my back, but it was flexing too much, so he strapped me into a stretcher instead.
I was 99 years and 274 days old the day it happened. It was the first time I’d ever crowd surfed. To break the record, I had to stay up for at least 10 seconds. There were 20,000 people in the crowd – we planned for them to move me in a straight line from the back to the front. But 20 minutes before we were due to start, we saw that everyone in the main crowd was sitting in chairs with gaps between them. Ross started panicking. We used the mosh pit instead, and I travelled in a U-shape from stage right to stage left.
I felt so content. I put my arms out and felt I could touch the sky I wore a white T-shirt with a red outline of my face on it so I would stand out from the crowd. Brantley introduced me and said: “I’ll beat you up if you drop Granny.”
I was launched out and I felt as if I was flying. I knew I had to trust everyone. Ross panicked because there was a walkway between both sides of the stage with a 10ft gap and a high fence that I had to be passed over. He jumped the fence as I went across and security people carried me over. I was held up for more than three minutes – nearly an entire song. I was so content. I put my arms out and felt I could touch the sky.
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View image in fullscreen Pauline Kana in the crowd Photograph: Courtesy of Pauline Kana When I got back on the stage, the crowd chanted, “Granny, Granny”. I stood there, soaking it all in. It gave me chills. I was recognised by Guinness World Records for becoming the oldest person to crowd surf at a concert .
Ross comes up with all the ideas. He says he’s Steven Spielberg and I’m Betty White. I only realised how much people liked our videos when I went to the grocery store one day and people were asking to take pictures with me.
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