World record for matchstick Eiffel Tower after U-turn

The 7.19m (23ft) tower had been disqualified on Wednesday for being made out of the wrong type of matches.

GWR said on Thursday it was too harsh at first and congratulated model-enthusiast Richard Plaud on his record.

Mr Plaud, 47, said this week had been an "emotional rollercoaster".

It took Mr Plaud eight years to build the model, which is made out of 706,900 matches and 23kg of glue.

He began building the tower by cutting the red, sulphur tops off commercial matches - but soon realised this would be a long and tedious process.

After contacting the manufacturer, Mr Plaud was sent kilos of plain wooden matches, and carried on building his model.

Mr Plaud, from Montpellier-de-Médillan in western France, completed the tower on 27 December and contacted GWR to authenticate his work.

He was later told it had been rejected as only "commercially available" matches qualified for a record-breaker - but on Thursday, the organisation changed its mind.

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.

Mr Plaud hopes to put his tower on display in Paris for the Olympics in July.

The previous world record was held by Toufic Daher from Lebanon, who built a 6.53m (21ft) Eiffel Tower in 2009.

-bbc