Taipei, Sept. 14 (CNA) A Taoist temple in Changhua County said Saturday that it has been flooded with about 20,000 orders for a baseball cap that is believed to have brought good luck to a Norwegian triathlete earlier this month, and it is trying hard to meet demand.

On Saturday, the day after the Mid-Autumn Festival, people started queuing up at 2 a.m. in front of the Taoist Shun Tse Temple in Puyan Township for the 1,000 free caps it was handing out, and 10 minutes after the handout started, the caps were all gone, said temple official Hsu Wei-chiao.

He said that this year, the temple had ordered 500 baseball caps bearing its name, but demand has spiked since 23-year-old Gustav Iden was seen wearing the cap when he crossed the finish line first in the 2019 Ironman race in France on Sept. 8.

As of Saturday, Hsu said, the temple had received some 20,000 orders for the cap, which will not be fulfilled until Oct. 20.

He said replicas of the cap are being sold online, therefore, the new caps will bear the temple's logo to distinguish them from the imitations.

When Iden won the 70.3-kilometer race in Nice in a record time of 3:52:35, he earned US$45,000 for what his first major victory.

Iden reportedly found the cap on the street in Tokyo last month and decided to wear it during the Ironman 70.3 World Championship in France in the hope that it would bring him good luck.

After his victory, he uploaded a photo to Instagram of himself crossing the finish line in the cap, which bears the Chinese characters "埔鹽順澤宮," the name of the temple.