Green Templeton student Ronan Llyr competes in Penn Relays

Green Templeton College’s Ronan Llyr recently competed in the Penn Relays at the University of Pennsylvania. His trip to the United States was supported by the Annual Disbursements Fund, which can provide grants for academic-related activities and support for activities relating to college life, including sports and societies.

Ronan shares his experiences from the Penn Relays:

The Penn Relays is the oldest and largest track and field meeting in the United States, having been hosted annually since 1895. In 1914, a team from Oxford University competed at the Relays, marking the first occasion that the event reached an international scale. In more recent decades, Oxford’s involvement with the event has declined. A relay team competed at the 2014 edition but beyond that, there has been no consistent opportunities for members of Oxford University Athletic Club (OUAC) to experience the Relays despite some strong ties between the universities.

Every four years, a combined athletics team from Penn and Cornell Universities visits the UK to compete against a combined Oxford and Cambridge team. June 2018 marked the Americans’ latest visit to Oxford as they convincingly won both the men’s and women’s matches. I was selected to compete at that match last June and was given the opportunity to socialise with many of our American rivals in the days before the meet. The outgoing Penn captain, Jeff Wiseman, was to take up a role in the university’s sports department upon graduating and we agreed that it would be worth attempting to re-establish OUAC’s sporting ties with the Relays. After many emails back and forth, a small team of athletes from OUAC were granted entry to the event.

A group of four members, including myself, two of the most recent club presidents and the current men’s captain travelled out a few days before the competition was to begin to stay with some of the student-athletes on campus, many of whom we had competed against the previous season. Each of us competed at different stages of the weekend with some mixed results. Personally, my performance was not up to the level that I had hoped, providing invaluable lessons in managing travel, jet-lag and competing in tornado weather warning conditions! Despite this, the experience was nothing short of incredible. The standard of the competition was truly world-class; one competitor in my heat of the 400m hurdles at the time held the fastest 400m time in the world in 2019.

As well as being an unrivalled standard of athletics, the event itself was spectacular. With almost 50,000 spectators attending on the Saturday, the atmosphere was electric. The main draw for many of these spectators each year is the ‘USA vs. the World’ relays where USA teams go head to head against relay teams from some of the biggest athletics nations in the world. The high school events also managed to whip the crowd into a frenzy as Jamaican school teams battled it out for the top prizes.

Beyond the athletics, we were able to explore the sporting and academic facilities at Penn and were given an insight into the life of a student-athlete at an Ivy League institution. Personally, the trip highlighted the contrasting approaches to sport between British and American universities. Sportspeople at American colleges have full-time coaching, state of the art facilities and all manner of support relating to nutrition, injury prevention/management and sport psychology. Much of this can be attributed to the philanthropic attitudes of alumni members of the sports clubs and well-established systems to facilitate such support. Furthermore, the University of Pennsylvania, like many American institutions, places a great value on sporting endeavours, providing significant backing.

In the UK, and at Oxford, I think we are behind our American colleagues regarding funding for sport but I was thrilled that Green Templeton saw the value in this event and facilitated my attendance. Without the financial support of Green Templeton, I would not have been able to take this rare opportunity and for this I am truly grateful. I am confident that the relationship between OUAC and the Penn Relays can continue for years to come, with various individuals on both sides eager to facilitate this. Hopefully, this will allow future generations of athletes to have similar experiences to the one I was fortunate enough to have. Not only was the trip a fantastic experience from a sporting perspective but it was also an invaluable opportunity to learn about how other institutions and clubs approach sport, providing insights that could be applied closer to home.