Bringing home the trophy: pictures and stories from MBAT

As I predicted, this year we really blasted the other schools away. This is the list of competitions that we won this year:
- Men's Rugby
- Women's Rugby
- Swimming
- Cricket
- Salsa
- Basketball
- Volleyball
- Climbing
- 7k Cross Country
- Tug of War

We also won 2nd places in Women's Football, Tennis, Mountain biking and Taek Won Do, as far as I can remember.

Not bad, eh? Following are some pictures and some stories from MBAT:
On the train from London to Paris on Thursday, we still looked fresh. As you see, we were in good spirits and ready to get the trophy!







Our school's security guard, Youssef, came along as a mascot and also as a kick-ass rugby player of the glorious men's rugby team. You might think other train passengers were scared by the horde of 200 cheerful and noisy London Business School passengers, but we treated everyone according to the Geneva Convention. Whenever a regular passenger wanted to trespass our coach, we would shout "civilians! civilians!" and everybody would go quiet, and someone from the rugby team would give the civilians an escort through our coach. It was hilarious.

Our key competitive advantage was the red London bus, which had been driven all the way from London to Paris to supply us with fruits and drinks throughout the weekend. It was parked on the side of the sports field, and gave students of other schools cause for envy, since they had no supplies throughout the games. We were compassionate, however, and offered everyone as much beer and fruits as they wanted. All they needed to agree to in return was to get a London Business School tatoo on their body and pledge to the superiority of London Business School :-). Call it winning the hearts and minds, and yes it worked!

Thanks to our great team and the best and loudest fans ever, we won the second place (out of 12 teams) in Women's Football. The final against IESE was tough, because we had to play back to back straight after an exhausting and fierce semifinal against HEC, with only 5min of rest in between, whereas the IESE team had had several hours of rest. We lost 0:2 in the pouring rain against a very strong and fit IESE team, but luckily thanks the great crowd of about 80 London Business School supporters on the pitch, we had a lot of fun and celebrated our 2nd place.


These were some of the fans celebrating next to the football pitch during the final. With fans like these, how can you let your head down during defeat? They really made sure we kept our spirits up. When rain started pouring down, the crowd shouted "London weather! London weather for you!", so we had to laugh on the pitch while getting soaked and beaten. Thanks to everyone who cheered for us, it helped a lot!



Another highlight was the tug of war competition. We put the strongest and biggest rugby players on the team, and they won with great ease. They brought each opposing team onto the ground within seconds.


Well, basically that was MBAT 2007. I will add more pics as I get them, since I didn't actually take many pics myself and need to wait for others to share them. We had a lot of fun. Now I'm absolutely exhausted. My big toe was injured in the second football match and I played three more matches ignoring the pain, until by Sunday I could hardly stand. I also cheered lots of teams on Sunday in the cold rain and have fever and a cold now. But it was worth it! I didn't go to class today and stayed in bed all day, already feeling better.