Snapshot: Athena’s Cup Statue in Woonsocket

Photograph by Wolf Matthewson

When Jennifer Jolicoeur had the idea to break the Guinness World Record for longest bra chain, she thought it would take less than a year. The owner of Athena’s Home Novelties, she founded the effort — known as Athena’s Cup — in 2009 as a way to honor women she knew who had breast cancer. “You feel very helpless when that happens to someone you care about,” she says. What followed was a ten-year campaign collecting bras and raising awareness for mammograms and breast cancer research along the way. From cancer survivors to colleagues to celebrities, everyone had a bra to donate. Even her grandfather got in on the effort, attending dances at the local senior center with a pin that said, “Can I have your bra?” “I was so filled with joy doing it because I felt this huge deep purpose, and we could touch so many lives,” Jolicoeur says. On Oct. 16, 2019, after two weeks of stringing bras together at River’s Edge Complex in Woonsocket, Athena’s Cup officially broke the record. The final count stood at 196,564 bras, or more than 124 miles. (The previous record was 166,625, set in Australia in 2009.) Earlier this year, the city of Woonsocket installed a statue of Athena outside the park to commemorate the record. The statue, photographed here at night, stands tall and proud as a reminder that in the face of insurmountable odds, sometimes a bit of whimsy can go a very long way. “It’s just this horrible disease that comes into people’s lives and takes people they love and puts them through hell and makes them suffer,” Jolicoeur says. “If we could bring a little bit of levity somehow, it was all worth it.”