Squirrel Olympics Defunded Due to Nutty Policies

Figure disputed; current value remains in force. Acorn totals reflect the organizing committee's own estimate. The acorns themselves were not independently located.

The county parks board voted five to nothing on Thursday to withdraw its annual appropriation from the Regional Squirrel Olympics, ending a 31-year arrangement after auditors concluded that the event's compensation practices could not be reconciled with any recognized accounting standard.

The games, held each October on the lawn behind the municipal band shell, pay competitors in acorns at a published rate of four per event entered and eleven for a podium finish. Auditors found the rate schedule itself unobjectionable. The difficulty, according to the report, is that each payment was buried by its recipient within minutes of disbursement and no receipt was ever produced.

'We asked for proof of payment and were shown a lawn,' said a spokesperson for the county comptroller. 'The committee maintains that the funds are somewhere on it. We do not dispute that. We cannot audit it.'

The 64-page report identifies 18,400 acorns disbursed since 2019, of which an estimated 4,100 were later recovered by the athletes themselves. Roughly 900 germinated. The comptroller's office has reclassified those as capital improvements, which referred the matter to the forestry division, which has no budget line for Olympic assets and has declined to accept them.

Medals present a similar problem. Committee rules award a gilt bottle cap to each first-place finisher and permit the winner to keep it wherever it chooses. Of 212 medals struck since the games began, three remain in the committee's possession. A fourth is lodged in a storm drain on Elm Street and has been listed as a permanent installation, because removing it would require a permit the committee cannot afford.

The board also cited the games' anti-doping program, which consists of a single volunteer who clears peanut butter from the obstacle course before each heat, and the ceremonial relay, whose rules allow the pinecone to finish wherever its final carrier stops. In 2024 it stopped inside the wall of the county records office, where it remains.

In a statement, the organizing committee said it stood by its compensation model. 'Our athletes have never once requested payment in any form other than the one they subsequently misplaced,' the statement read. 'We regard that as satisfaction.'

The committee added that it had set aside a reserve fund against exactly this contingency, and that the reserve was buried in 1998 at a location recorded in the minutes. The minutes were filed in the band shell and have since been eaten.

This year's games will proceed without county support. Competitors were notified through the customary channel, a printed notice left on the band shell steps, which was taken by an entrant before noon and has not been recovered.