Guinness World Record breaks silence after rejecting man who spent eight years building 23ft Eiffel Tower

Imagine spending eight years crafting a sculpture to set a world record, only for the officials at Guinness World Records to rule it out. Devastating.

This is what happened to Mr. Plaud from Montpellier-de-Médillan in western France.

Mr Plaud began building the tower by snipping off the red sulphur tops from regular matches before realising that this would be a long, tedious process. He then decided to contact the manufacturer to be sent kilos of plain wooden matches without the sulphur tips to speed up the process and continue building his model.

Richard Plaud/Reuters

The tower, which was completed on 27 December last year, was then assessed by Guiness World Records to determine its authenticity.

Sadly for Mr Plaud, GWR told him that his entry had been rejected as only 'commercially available' matches would qualify for creating a record-breaker.

Thankfully for the Frenchman, GWR decided to do a U-turn on their decision on Thursday 8 February.

Mark Mckinley from Guinness World Records said the organisation was "really excited to be able to approve it".

"We're happy to be able to admit that we were a little bit too harsh on the type of matches needed in this attempt, and Richard's attempt truly is officially amazing," he added.

Plaud, thrilled with the result, hopes to put the tower on display in Paris in time for the Olympics being held there in July this year.

The 7.19m (23ft) tower surpasses that of previous world record holder, Toufic Daher from Lebanon, who built a 6.53m (21ft) Eiffel Tower in 2009.

Richard Plaud

Mr Plaud described the events as an 'emotional rollercoaster' ever since his model was rejected.

His impressive sculpture consists of 706,000 matches stuck together with 23 kilos of glue.

Plaud said: "For eight years, I've always thought that I was building the tallest matchstick structure."

But when he heard the news that all his efforts could have been in vain, he said it was 'frustrating', and 'not very fair play'.

Plaud took to social media to share his utter disappointment. He wrote: "Tell me how 706,900 sticks stuck one by one are not matches.

"My matchstick tower still stands and will be 7.19 meters for a long time."

Plaud completed the work of art on the 100th anniversary of the death of the actual tower's engineer, and believes he has poured 4,200 hours of his time into the project since December 2015.

Mr. Plaud's wife, Sandra, joked to a local television station that she was looking forward to getting her living room back.