Outside of term time, it can be easy to miss some of the goings-on in Oxford. After all, for most undergraduates, town and gown spend less than half the year together. As I happened to be in Oxford this week, I was fortunate enough to witness part of an event I would otherwise have missed; an event rendered all the more interesting by the noble cause that it supports.
Shortly after bells chimed 2pm on Sunday 21st August, Broad Street began to fill with competitors in the 11th European Transplant and Dialysis Sports Games.
The Games, which take place every two years, allow dialysis patients and recipients of transplants across Europe to compete in sports of their liking together. These range from swimming to tennis, football to bowling, golf to swimming, cycling to pétanque, and a 5k run. According to the World Transplant Games Federation, the aim of the Games is to ‘promote the huge benefits of organ donation and amazing life-saving impact of organ transplantation’. TransplantSport adds that it will hopefully attract ‘media interest both locally in the Thames Valley area and nationally in the UK’.
Oxford has the privilege of being the first UK city ever to host the games since their Athenian birth in 2000. Moreover, the week-long Games at Oxford follow a four year hiatus since the previous ones at Caligari, Italy, in 2018. Like almost all events at the time, the 2020 Games, planned to take place in Dublin, were cancelled due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Oxford’s historic Sheldonian Theatre bore witness to the opening and closing ceremonies. These featured a melange of music and dance, smatterings of Shakespearean iambi, with a gala ball – modelled on a college ball – topping off the week’s elation. Radley College, an independent boys’ boarding school situated five miles south of the city centre, and Blenheim Palace were among the organisations offering their facilities as sports venues for what was estimated to be the arrival of over 400 competitors representing roughly 25 different national teams.
On Broad Street, a vibrant array of national flags decorated competitors’ sports jerseys: Dutch, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese, Italian, Kazakh, Cypriot, and Andorran, to name but a few. According to ITV, the Great Britain and Northern Ireland team constitutes the largest in the competition with 186 competitors from across the UK including 12 dialysis patients and 3 donors. Competitors from different European nations took photos together and conversed, often using English as a lingua franca, about the event and their individual experiences of organ transplantation. One competitor remarked on the need to adjust to cycling on the left-hand side of the road: a UK idiosyncrasy scarcely shared in Europe. Another competitor, a French track and field athlete, told us that he is participating in the European Games for the first time here in Oxford. Previously, he thoroughly enjoyed travelling to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Gateshead in 2019 for the World Transplant Games, a sister event predating the European Games by two decades and conducted on a larger scale. The back of his navy jersey sported the slogan: “Le don d’organes je dis oui!” [I say yes to organ donation!]
Over two years since the UK’s departure from the European Union, cultural events – whether it be Eurovision, the recent UEFA Women’s Euro or this latest event – demonstrate enduring ties of respect and good sportsmanship with the Continent through competition. How fitting that this should occur at Oxford: a multicultural city with a global outlook.
You can make a charitable contribution to the World Transplant Games Federation and Transplant Sport here: