08 September 2009

2009 IPC Olympics: Removing Barriers and Getting Fit at the Same Time

By Shirley Ghozalli. From a report by Hideto Kasahara, translated by Shirley Ghozalli. Edited by Moira Blake.

Sports participants all gather without nationality or language barriers

Getting ready for group skipping with the long rope

Boxing competition: A serious fight but safely performed

The heroic fighters of the competition

A sports competition is a good event for enabling the members of a community to get to know each other, and at the same time to get some physical exercise. The student community at IPC thought the same way too. So, on the evening of Friday and Saturday 4th and 5th September, a competition called "IPC Olympics" was held in the recreation centre.

There were 3 big groups participating in the competition whose members were the residents from all 10 Halls of Residences. The groups were called blue, red, and yellow teams. The blue team consisted of residents from Halls 1, 4, and 7. The red team members were from Halls 2, 6, and 8, and the yellow team members from Hall 3, 5, 9, and 10. IPC Students Association established this system of grouping to be used in its year-round competitions. The whole scheme is called the House Competition.

The organizer of the 2009 IPC Olympics, Hideto Kasahara (a 2007 student from Japan), reports:

A conversation with IPCSA President Greg Ng was the catalyst for this year's IPC Olympics. There were already many small and random sports competitions going on between teams of international members. So we thought we should make a bigger competition.

After a discussion with last year's organizer, Daehee Lee (a 2007 student from South Korea), we decided to do a 2-day event. We wanted to create a hard competition so on the first day, we put in 2 sports we had last year, hand wrestling and tug of war, and also two new sports - group skipping with a long rope and a 20m shuttle run. For the second day, we organized an integrated martial arts competition. The atmosphere in the rec centre was so different that day. So much excitement!

For this event, the message Greg wanted to send out was "Show that IPC is what students make it to be." The number of people coming on the first day surprised us. It was more than we expected. By the end of the games, we just didn't feel any nationality barrier between the teams any more. On the second day, a lot of students and lecturers also came to watch the martial arts competition.

Especially for this type of competition, safety was the number one priority. All the fighters had to undergo some basic training, such as how to do passive defence. For more than 2 months, almost every night, the fighters gathered in the gym and trained so that they could fight safely. We went this extra mile because we were not looking for who was the strongest but we wanted to focus on how to entertain the audience. Of course it was still a serious competition, but there were no quarrels or feuds because we were friends to begin with. Now, thanks to the heroic effort of the fighters, the usual days at IPC are not the same anymore.

By the end of the day, yellow team had won the competition, collecting the highest number of points from all the games during the event, while red team grabbed the second place and blue team the third place. Congratulation to all the teams! Well done!

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