In line with the London Olympics 2012, Google has been presenting several Google Doodle representing different Olympic sports since the opening ceremony last Friday.

For today’s doodle, Google has presented its “London 2012 Hurdles”, an interactive hurdle game featuring a male athlete ready on the track to run. With just a press of the red button, the athlete goes into action.

To play the game, users must use their computer’s keyboard by pressing the left and right keys to speed up and the spacebar to jump over the hurdles as given in the instructions on the doodle. The objective is to run a sequence of ten hurdles in the fastest possible time. Unlike the Olympic hurdles, the hurdles in this doodle are not evenly placed.

London 2012 Hurdles Google Doodle

Hurdling is a popular Olympic track and field sport in which both men and women are allowed to participate and made to run over ten equally-spaced hurdles. Each hurdle is positioned so that they will fall over if bumped into by the runner. Fallen hurdles don’t count against runners, but they have a significant pull-over weight which slows down the run.

Men participate in 110 meters hurdles while women in the 100 meter hurdles. The fastest time in the 110 meters hurdles was achieved by Dayron Robles in the 2008 Beijing Olympics at a time of 12.93 seconds. For the 100 meters hurdles, the current record was held by Yordanka Donkova who finished the race at 12.21 seconds during the 1988 Olympics held in Bulgaria.

Go and try today’s “London 2012 Hurdles” Google Doodle and let us know if you can beat the current 12.21 seconds world record. I have tried it myself several times and I achieved 10.4 seconds as my fastest time.