You may have heard by now about MBATs—the MBA Olympics hosted by HEC outside of Paris. Trusted alums told me that this would be the best event of the year, and I wasn’t disappointed. Go to www.mbat.org to check out the official event site. I’ve been told that organizing the event (4 days, 2000 MBAs, 24 sports!) is part of the operations management assessment for the HEC students.  

About 160 of us piled into three buses early Thursday morning for the 12+ hour ride to Paris. First thing the next morning, game on. It was pretty fun to see the athlete come out in people that you wouldn’t have expected (or seen) otherwise. One guy on our course ran the 100 meters in 11.8 seconds on a shoddy track! Another guy was a phenomenal rock climber. A friend of mine who claims to “jog” occasionally came out and placed third on our team in the 7 km cross country race, beating all the girls and most of the other guys! Needless to say, I’m not jogging with her anymore ; )

Our ultimate frisbee team placed second overall. It was the last sport of the first day, so we ended up with a huge cheering squad. We had to go up against London Business School, which had a bunch of American guys who had played a lot before. We were down 4-0 after about 10 minutes, then managed to bring it back to 5-5, then they took off again and I think we lost 10-6 or something. It was a great game, though, and so fun to have lots of people watching, cheering, saying things like, “wow, I didn’t know this is how you played frisbee!”

I ran cross country too, which was literally the most pathetic race of my life–I wasn’t planning to run, but got woken up by the cross country captain at 7:30 am saying “we need one more girl to field two teams…you have to save the day!!” Of course, I’m a sucker for saving the day so I stumbled out of bed and ran to catch the bus to the starting point. I was exhausted from the day before, dehydrated, confused, and the course was really long and really hilly…I think I ran about 10 minute miles the whole way just trying not to die. In the end, they didn’t count our second team, so the whole thing was pointless. The only good out of it was that it gave me a chance to preview the course for the mountain biking race later that day. Let’s just say it was a lot more fun on a bike.

Our guys rugby team won the whole tournament—I haven’t ever paid attention to rugby before coming here, but it is by far the roughest game I’ve ever seen. At the end of the last match the guys all looked like they’d been through a war zone—dislocated shoulders, twisted ankles, scrapes, stitches, bruises…but wearing their gold medals proudly. The weather was gorgeous all weekend, and a bunch of us went to Versailles for the afternoon before catching the overnight bus back to Oxford. Now, back to life—3 assignments due this week.