ISCEV Olympics – a note from the Prof Colin Barber a.k.a. the Games Master 

The ISCEV Olympics competition started in 1993, when the ISCEV Symposium was hosted in Chiba, Japan, by Professor Emiko Adachi and her staff, and the symposium participants were housed in an Olympic training ground in Chiba Prefecture, thus making it financially accessible to overseas participants.

It comprises “athletic” contests between geographically-defined teams, roughly based on ISCEV’s three regions (The Americas, Europe/Africa, and Asia). These are sub-divided in various ways so as to yield teams of approximately equal size, and they are also constrained in various ways.

For example, each team must contain at least one male, one female, one person under 25 one person over 50 and so on, and so on. In addition, they are required to put forward one person of impeccable character to act as a judge both in the field and in the tie-breaker competition (should one be needed) which is held following the Gala Dinner.

Of course, none of this team construction can be completed until all the participants are actually known, and usually I do this when every participant is actually on-site.

The competitions are generally based on sports/games that are indigenous to the host country/city. For example, in Boston it was baseball, in Sydney it involved boomerangs, and so on. My suggestions for Liverpool would be football, cricket and horse-racing, and I have ideas on how …

Take a virtual tour of the venue of Abercromby Square here

Controlling and scoring these games is quite complicated and relies on those of us in the “Social Sub-group” to maintain order and fairness. Almost inevitably there is need for a tie-breaker competition after the Gala Dinner.