U.S. Challenge spotlights teamwork as path to success
From roanoke.com (originally posted on Oct. 21st)
by Ray Reed
Being the fastest doesn’t put you first in the international sports-and-brains challenge that’s under way in Roanoke this weekend.
And, being a local team with riders who know the trails around Carvins Cove doesn’t add up to a home-course advantage.
“It’s much more complex than that,” said Andrew Finan, managing director of Challenger World, a British company that organizes competitions for corporations whose brightest and fittest employees test their strength and strategy against other teams.
“It’s all strategy,” said Landon Armbruster of Talx Corp. of St. Louis, one of the early finishers in Friday morning’s Stage 2 of the challenge.
The event brought about 250 competitors from 49 teams across the United States and Europe to the Roanoke Valley for the weekend.
Competition started Thursday night with teams racing in the dark on Mill Mountain’s trails, using maps they drew by hand from instructions at the starting point. Roanoke College’s team completed the course first in that stage.
It’s not quite the World Series, but the event’s sponsors take it seriously; the official name is the BG U.S. Challenge Presented by Fortune magazine. That three-brand title didn’t include Lewis-Gale Medical Center, which paid $25,000 to be the “platinum sponsor” in the Roanoke Valley.
The challenge is not for beginners. At least four competitors rode to hospitals in ambulances, according to Roanoke County emergency personnel; injuries described at the race’s command post referred to collar bone for one victim and pelvis for another.
“Is that all we got? Fifty-seven bonus points?” asked Mike Meadows, captain of the Lewis-Gale Medical Center team that finished several minutes ahead of all the 48 other teams Friday morning.
This competition may not be stacked, but a celebrity team of people who appeared on TV shows “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race” were delighted with the preliminary results.
Burton Roberts, a contender from “Survivor: Pearl Islands” in 2003, scanned the results posted in Stage 2 by his St. Jude Reality All Stars team.
Calculating bonus points in his head and subtracting them from the Reality team’s race time, Roberts said: “Unless I did something wrong, our time was …” and he held up thumb and forefinger in a circle signifying zero, a score that would be hard to beat.
Official results of Stage 2 were not available Friday afternoon; the challenge’s public relations manager Kate Bickford said the scoring system was too complex to settle on a leader that early.
Teams could earn up to 370 bonus points by electronically recording their visits to checkpoints on the cove’s trail network.
Reality team member Hunter Ellis from “Survivor: Marquesas” in 2002, now a History Channel host, said the team split in two to hit as many checkpoints as possible, but rain Thursday night left the trails muddy and forced them to change their plan.
Ellis described a trail so steep they could only carry their bikes and run up it, apparently the trail known locally to Carvins Cove users as “The Comet.”
“We wound up together before we’d planned to and decided we could use the roads to get back faster,” said a wet but smiling Ellis. Apparently, they managed to hit most of the checkpoints.
Roberts and Ellis were voted off their respective “Survivor” shows for being too good in the episodes’ “immunity challenges,” but those qualities were assets Friday morning.
One of their teammates, Danny Moy, a veteran of adventure-race sports, said the shows apparently molded Ellis, Roberts and Brennan Swain, a winner on “The Amazing Race,” into skillful competitors.
“These guys are really great. They think on their feet. These shows they’ve been on helped them with that,” said Moy, of Newport Beach, Calif.
Moy, for his part, drew praise from teammates for needing only three minutes to fix a bike chain that Roberts broke on a steep hill climb.
Aside from bragging rights, the winning team will have responsibilities.
David Keane of sponsor BG NA, a British natural gas company that’s trying to spread its brand recognition, said team members will visit the company’s 76 locations and explain to employees how they won.
The challenge requires competitors to think, react, operate as a team, communicate and implement strategy — “everything you do as a company,” Keane said.