A Competition With A Higher Aim Than Winning

As a college athlete (track and field), I understand the desire to put on a good performance while on one’s home turf. So when I was talking to high school students from Team Ubbo Emmius from the Netherlands at Shell Eco-marathon Europe, I expected them to feel the same way about “home field advantage” giving them an upper hand on the competition in Rotterdam.

To my surprise, they didn’t see it that way at all. “Not only do we want to do well, we also want to see all of the other teams do well,” they said in our conversation. “We don’t really feel any kind of rivalry with other countries or teams.”  Rather than seeing this event as 200 separate

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