''Our aim is to have the level of recognition that it becomes an Olympic sport,'' he said. ''If you can have synchronized swimming and curling, I think extreme ironing has as much to offer.''

It would be the first Olympic sport in which the athletes did not use their real names. ''In order to avoid the ridicule of our peers,'' Mr. Shaw and his compadres adopt pseudonyms, he wrote in a how-to book, ''Extreme Ironing.'' Mr. Shaw is Steam. Others are Cool Silk, Iron Mike, Fe (the chemical symbol for iron), Jeremy Irons and Iron Lung.

The first Extreme Ironing World Championship was held in Germany in 2002 and was judged by a white-gloved panel of German homemakers. (A second world championship could come soon.) Eighty teams from 10 countries competed on an obstacle course arrayed in the shape of an iron, pressing boxer shorts and blouses while scaling a climbing wall, hanging from a moss-covered tree branch and squeezing under the hood of a car.

The actual ironing does count. ''Ironists,'' Mr. Shaw wrote in his book, ''are sometimes so absorbed in getting themselves into some sort of awkward or dangerous situation with their ironing board that they forget the main reason they are there in the first place: to rid their clothing of creases and wrinkles.'' The quality of the pressing counts for 60 of 120 points. Style counts for 40 points and speed 20.

Mr. Shaw's team took a gold medal, as did a German contestant, Hot Pants, who won a trip to Hawaii. ''She really took care on her collars and cuffs,'' said Short Fuse, aka Penny Wilkerson, who is on the American tour along with Starch (Matthew Patrick) and Steam.

No iron is right for every situation. A ''one-iron,'' the heaviest, is, Mr. Shaw wrote, ''excellent for those stubborn creases and strenuous situations involving high winds, but too heavy and awkward for long-distance ironing.''

Sometimes the ironists lug electrical generators, but other times they heat their irons on portable gas stoves. A German ironist, Dr. Iron Q, has treated an iron with a chemical that heats up when water is applied.