These Sauna Championships Are a Crazy Spectacle

"When I tell people what I do, they think I'm a crazy person," says Aufguss WM competitor Xavier Drouin-Hill. Read on, and you'll understand why. As Sarah Everts writes in a lengthy piece for the Walrus, the event—technically the Aufguss Weltmeisterschaft, or Infusion World Championship—is a mashup of theater, choreography, and 185-degree heat, where competitors from perform elaborate routines with towels, props, and music inside a giant sauna for a packed house of naked spectators. This year's world championship near Verona, Italy, drew over 200 audience members, 12 judges, and more than 100 competitors, with Canada and the US among the first-time contenders.

The performances are judged on artistry and technical skill, with routines ranging from reinterpretations of classic stories (one performer told a Peter Pan-inspired tale) to original dramas (another recounted the story of a Slovakian immigrant to the US who designed a parachute prototype in the early 20th century). Props, light effects, and acrobatic towel tricks—like the Pizza Spin and Angel Wings—are all part of the show.

Those towel routines consist of "complicated choreography," writes Everts, so much so that one past champ who formerly played competitive soccer tells her he thinks these performances are more physically demanding. "It's only fifteen minutes," he says, "but you are focusing on the acting, connecting with the audience, the Aufguss ritual, the towel tricks, moving the air around a huge sauna—and it's so hot." The Aufguss ritual is a reference to a much more staid aromatic ceremony in which essential-oil-infused snowballs are put on the sauna's hot rocks before towels are elegantly waved to push the aromatic air throughout the sauna. (Read the wild full story here.)