City Challenge 2007
Months of physical and mental preparation have paid off and Atkins Financial Services Practice have brought home not one, but a brace of trophies from City Challenge 2007 - First Mixed Team, and First Financial Services (supply side) Team.
The City Challenge teams consisted of: Guy Brockdorff, Clive Broadbent, Karen Henning, Diane Stean, Richard Hewitt, Gareth Ough, Juliette Chrisman, Dale Vearncombe and Christopher Man.
Bletchley Park was the venue and nearly 60 teams took part, many of them veterans of the Challenger World Series and the course was extremely demanding. First, in keeping with the setting (WW2 home of code-breaking) teams had to navigate around the park collecting coded messages, ranging from the very basic to highly complex substitution ciphers - each decrypted message won bonus minutes to be taken off the final time. Atkins stormed home coming in a clear 7 minutes ahead of favourites QinetiQ.
Minutes later we were in the cars and off to the next stage where limited materials and tools were provided to construct a mechanism capable of moving a stack of wooden blocks from one area to another to gain bonuses. An array of Heath Robinson, crane-like contraptions appeared over the next hour, and cries of anguish emerged from the crowd as teams knocked over their stacks and were forced to start over. Rivals exploited a loop-hole in the rules and finished after just a few minutes and in spite of our engineering skills producing robust and effective designs, we were off the pace – but with the most testing stage still to come, there was still plenty to play for.
With just a few minutes to knock back dried-out sandwiches and warm water, the captains were summoned to another briefing for the final stage. Marshals handed out 6 pages of instructions and gave them just 5 minutes to read them. Following that a further five minutes were allowed to brief the rest of the team before the starter pistol fired and the race was on again. This time it was 2.5 hours of mountain biking, running and kayaking whilst navigating to checkpoints spread over an area of 20 hectares. Teams first had to gather as much flight time as possible in the form of tokens available from certain points on the map and then set off in to the open countryside to collect the bonuses and navigate back to base before the flight time expired. To complicate matter further check points opened and closed at certain times throughout the stage so the shortest route would be unlikely to yield the best score. Once again, no amount of physical prowess would compensate for the wrong strategy and even the fittest teams incurred huge penalties.
All this on one of the hottest April days on record and 5 hours sleep!
Huge thanks go to Clive Broadbent, who spent untold hours preparing the squad over the last 12 weeks and gave up a sought-after place in the London Marathon in order to lead his team to victory in two categories. To Lexus and Zenith for the loan of two of their superb Hybrid SUVs as support vehicles, providing much needed refuge between stages and a healthy dose of showmanship to psyche the opposition! And to Cycleopedia of Surbiton who loaned equipment. And finally to the Leadership Team for providing us with the opportunity and funding to take part (hope to see some of you on the team next time!)
The event has raised over £50,000 for Leukaemia Research so far - that's enough to fund a leading researcher for a year! Our sponsorship page is still open, so if you haven't already done so please go and give what you can - http://www.justgiving.com/AtkinsCityChallenge
Guy Brockdorff, Practice Director FS: “Financial Services is a fairly new but key market for Atkins, and much of the challenge is raising our profile. A client once told me the best way to get noticed in the City was to gat a top ten place in City Challenge, well we certainly did that! “
Challenger World: “Congratulations to Atkins on their first effort in Intelligent Sport. Our challenges are specifically designed by our trained course directors to test intelligence, physical ability and strategic capability. Success is only achieved through the application of effective strategy which demands mental agility, clear decision making, communication, leadership but ultimately teamwork. To have achieved this level of success on the first attempt speaks volumes for Atkins, so well done from the Challenger World team - you are clearly ready for a bigger challenge! We hope we are able to welcome you to Intelligent Sport's flagship event, the Microsoft UK Challenge in June this year, where Atkins Management can take on many of the countries leading companies in 4 days of intense competition.”
