Fun at CRY Cadence Corporate Citizenship challenge

1. Freescale Semiconductor (3 golds)

2. Cadence Design Systems (3 golds)

3. K.P.M.G. (1 gold)

We did good in badminton, managing to sneak out a silver in the team event. Cadence got golds in Football, Table Tennis (mens) and Table Tennis(Veterans).

My overall perception was that the field in most of the events was not of the level you come to expect in a specific sport corporate tournament. And that is to be expected as well. The field in the Eventus corporate badminton tournament will always be stronger than the badminton field in a multi-sport corporate tournament. And the same holds truth for other games like Basketball, Football, Table Tennis, etc.

In Badminton, Freescale was by far the best team of the competition. Cadence was second best, and though we thought that given certain combinations we could give them a decent fight, it never really worked out exactly the way we would have wanted. The first day was the league, and the second day had knockouts starting with the quarter-finals. The rest of the teams were easy meat. KPMG guys were okay (though their womens team counterparts were sweeter). In short, we finished our tournament by Lunch on Sunday and were off to Modern school to catch the rest of the action.

Was able to catch up on the Football finals at Modern school, where Cadence won a hard fought encounter with KPMG. Also saw the Basketball finals, where KPMG won an engrossing match against QA Infotech. The Cadence guys were all cheering for KPMG as they got some rough handling from QA in the semis, and suspected some non-regular players in the QA team. I myself gave some of the choicest to the QA guys.

We went into the 5K run with the hope of getting a medal, probably a gold, from one of our best runners. However, running is something which is an unknown, and a talented or experienced athlete can whip a passionate runners ass like anything, and that’s what we got. There was one runner from Freescale who we later heard runs like a 16 or 17 min 5K, and who was the comfortable winner. Our guy stretched hard towards the end to outrun another of those Freescale runners to get his hands on the bronze. In fact there was a confusion at the finish, where the runner who came in second may have run a lap less, but the objection did not stand, and a bit of poor race management by the organizers did not result in any other resolution.

Media reports on this event: Times of India, Sindh Today