Life in Switzerland: The Paris MBA Olympics

The second weekend of May we left Lausanne early in the morning just after 7am for the 6 hour drive to Paris to go to the MBA Olympics. We first went to the center of Paris to have a few hours to walk around the city before continuing on to the HEC campus and our hotel. The first night was the welcome dinner and salsa competition, and with a grand total of about 2000 MBA students from more than a dozen schools it was a chaotic and disorganized adventure.

I competed in ping pong, basketball, and as a last minute replacement in tennis. The schools all seemed to be very competitive, and as captain of cheerleading my job was to keep everyone from IMD upbeat and motivated during the weekend. One of my favorite parts was teaching everyone the cheers to use at the games (recycled from college marching band) and playing DJ on the stereo system during our bus rides to and from our hotel.

Out of the six games I played, I won two, both basketball, which makes sense because its the sport I played the most as a child. Other games included badminton, petanque, cricket, soccer, foosball, chess, rugby, volleyball, climbing, cross country, swimming, dodgeball, and tug-of-war.

Out of 13 schools that attended the Olympics, IMD came in 5th place, a showing that we were all extremely proud of considering that we are a significantly smaller program than any other school. We won first place in Climbing and in Men’s Cross-Country and second place in Petanque and in team Cross Country (men’s and women’s combined). Our massive displays of team spirit dumbfounded the other schools, and we were the only school who had school specific cheer and chants prepared ahead of time. And after we displayed our prowess in using a megaphone to raise spirit, some other schools scrambled to find one as well.

While the weekend was fantastic for strengthening the friendships between classmates at IMD, it was surprisingly bad for building inter-school friendships. For one, the organization provided by HEC was terrible. It was difficult to find where we were supposed to go for the various sports, every schedule ran significantly behind, and the accurate recording of the results was questionable at best, as they were haphazardly handwritten on the back of whatever paper was lying around amid the chaos of multiple games continuing on. I got the feeling that the whole thing has grown too large to be managed efficiently, although a couple of basic improvements could probably make a large difference.

On the last night, for the awards ceremony and party, HEC had rented a club in the center of Paris, called 1515, to house in theory all 2000 participants and provide dinner and drinks. The bar was not open when we arrived, and dinner was non-existent, with fleeting trays of cold pizza coming out in small batches and being consumed almost instantaneously. The announcements and awards finished at 8:45, but the bar stayed closed until 9:30, and when it did open the crush of people trying to get up to it eclipsed any chance of actually getting a drink. The DJ, however, was quite good, spinning an impressive mix of unrelated songs seamlessly. A group of us stayed until midnight and then left to find another bar and get some real food, and ended up at a place on the Champs Elysees near the Arc de Triomphe.

We arrived home in the early evening on Sunday, tired and sore from two full days of sports and parties. The chance to get out of Lausanne, spend time with each other, and to get to see Paris was priceless, and I have dozens of fantastic memories from the weekend that are more than worth the less than perfect bits. We may only have 90 students, but we had more spirit than any team there.