“Watch out for the moss!”: How this 15-year-old YouTube video became cult

In 2008, YouTube is only three years old and since then some videos have become a cult. While memes are full of Internet history, videos also have their share of success, and this so-called “Beware of the Moss” is one of them.

Published on August 15, 2008, the video shows the arrival of the roller skating race in Strasbourg Europe, which brought together a hundred participants that year. And at the finish line, there’s a foam mat “placed there to cover the antenna that communicates with the chips on the rollers as they go by,” the video’s author explained. Releasein 2018.

The author of the video calls himself Blob on YouTube, his real name Frédéric Mossmann, a computer scientist with a passion for skating. To the newspaper he admits that he put this video on the Internet because he found it “funny”. He had placed two cameras at the finish line to immortalize the competition.

But that’s without counting the enormous mess that occurred at this finish line. As the organizers yell “Watch out for the foam!” for participants to slow down before they panic. And no less than five of them fall in the space of a minute.

two million views

Although the waterfalls are interconnected, some falls seem quite serious. The first to fall is a woman, then the medical team took her away. Other participants chain the “bowls” at the same time. Even the organizers on the sides get nervous.

One of the participants literally clings to a security guard, who crashes into the barriers and is also injured. “The problem is not the ‘foam’ but the inexperience of the participants in a ‘race’ (and not on skates) who do not know how to control their skates,” says Frédéric Mossmann, in the description of his video. .

Fifteen years later, the video has amassed more than 2.7 million views. But his success came late. It was revealed to the public in particular by the D17 channel in 2014, which exaggerates this type of gag.

The video also had a second hit, ten years later on Twitter. the tweet its broadcast garnered more than 24,000 retweets. The video has since been removed from the tweet.