The number-one marble racing entity on the internet is Jelle’s Marble Runs. The Netherlands-based YouTube channel has 1.5 million subs, nearly 800 videos, dozens of “teams” and race “venues,” surprisingly elaborate lore, and a sheen of professional quality rivaling any ESPN sportscast. Part of that quality comes from the stellar commentary of Iowan Greg Woods.
Woods, whose main job is with the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, has provided play-by-play for all Jelle’s Marble Runs events going on a decade. A fan of Formula 1 racing with experience commentating the Drake Relays, Woods recorded himself calling the action on one of Jelle (pronounced like “yelluh”) Bakker’s videos back in February 2016. The recording caught Bakker’s attention, and he invited Woods to partner with his spherical sporting apparatus.
Newcomers to the channel’s marble madness will find regularly scheduled leagues and tournaments, conducted with the kind of immersive, unshakable kayfabe found in pro wrestling. As of this writing, the sixth season of Marbula One is underway, following the Marble League summer season (formerly named the MarbleLympics).
The team behind the channel is meticulous in crafting miniature arenas with elaborate, ever-changing courses, populated by marble spectators (complete with dynamic crowd sounds and chants) and hundreds of marble athletes, each with a name and backstory.
Woods has his own marble avatar — a dark orb with a white swirl, always situated above the action on the racecourse. The races are filmed separately from Woods’ commentary, but he treats each recording session like a live event, fresh and unscripted.
“Normally I’ll watch the first few seconds [of a video] just to see how long I need to talk before the action starts. That gives me a general idea of what kind of intro I need to give,” he said in an interview with Little Village.
“Usually it’s just the one take, and for better or worse, that’s what you get.”
Jelle’s team will occasionally send Woods background notes “if it’s a new event, or if it’s got a different scoring system,” he explained. “They don’t tell me what happens results-wise, which is good.”
After listening back to see if audio adjustments are necessary, Woods then sends the file to his Dutch compadres to continue the video editing and upload process.
A longtime Jelle’s Marble Runs fan myself (go Midnight Wisps), I always suspected Woods used single takes. You can feel that urgency in the commentating. “If I had to try to redo it, or try to craft it in a recorded setting, I worry that you’d be able to tell,” he said.
“There’d be something in the voice, a giveaway. So I just treat it as if I’m viewing it live, and that’s all I got. So I better make it count.”
Jelle’s Marble Runs saw a huge spike in viewership during the pandemic, culminating in a sponsorship by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in 2020. (Well, technically, it was the marble “John Rolliver” that sponsored that year’s Marble League.)
“I think it’s been forced to evolve several times, and usually it’s always been for the better,” Woods said of the channel, which Jelle Bakker first launched in 2006. “But that was nothing like what happened when it went viral during the pandemic. That was a whole other animal, and really forced us to change how we went about several different things surrounding promotion and scaling.”
Jelle’s is now a brand, selling marbles, marble runs and team merch online. It’s also grown into a subculture to rival storied sports leagues and cinematic universes.
“Jelle’s been able to do a lot more with detail, but the overall world-building feel of it, his flair in designing that marble world, remained remarkably consistent,” Woods said. “Also what the fans have done, too, because the lore has added so much to it. The engagement has really driven it in a way that I would never have guessed back in those first few videos.”
“Marble-Earth” has its own cities and countries, but Woods occasionally lets his Iowa flag fly. A recent Marble League bout hosted by the Orangers in their Wild West-themed home turf of Orlango included a corn maze event, prompting Woods to mention his IRL home state. “Ten seconds in,” a viewer wrote in the comments, “and Iowa has somehow been added to the marble canon despite the U.S. not being in the marble-verse.”
Fans have made a wiki to catalogue this marble-verse, which Woods said comes in handy.
“I try to keep track as best I can. I am certainly not as deep into it as some people are,” he admitted. “I’ll dip into the wiki … if I’m looking for something specific to say about a host team, or about a track, because some of the tracks were designed by the marbles. Some of them met at university when they first formed their team, and those little things. I used to do this with the Drake Relays — having a bunch of things on tap ready to go, just in case you had time to talk about it. If you can bring even just a few stats, then that adds to the commentary realism as well.”
Some of the Iowa love Woods has shown on the channel has come back to him.
“I had actually gotten a request to come and speak to a school in West Branch. They said, ‘Hey, the kids are all big fans. We heard you’re from Iowa. Would you be willing to come over and talk to them for a little bit?’ Like, I don’t know what the heck I’m gonna say. They’re gonna see me and be like, ‘he’s not a marble, who’s this random guy?’ But it was a great afternoon. They asked all kinds of questions. They made some of their own marble runs and it was just this very surreal moment of, huh, you never know where this is going to touch.”
You never know how the marble races will go down, either. The randomness of the runs produces some odd patterns over time; there seem to be specific marbles or teams that consistently excel at certain types of events. Sometimes there’s a massive gulf between the first and last place finisher, despite the marbles being identical in size, shape and weight. The chaos theory of probability runs amok, adding to the mystique of it all.
“That inadvertently mirrors real sports, too,” Woods observed. “On any given day in certain events or in certain sports, somebody could come out of nowhere. I’m sure if you were a physics major or something, you could explain a lot of it. ‘Well, this caused this, and the friction coefficient and everything else here’ … but we’re not doing that on these videos. We are treating this just like you would in real sports. ‘What an upset,’ or, ‘An excellent come-from-behind!’ Those are the things that really drive you as a sports fan to keep watching.”
“There’s something in it for just about anybody you know,” he added. “It’s not only exclusive to the sports fans. It’s not only exclusive to the fans of — I don’t know what else you’d call it — whimsy or the unusual. It is its own thing, depending on how you watch it.”
This article is from Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
