The final day of this year’s Varsity ski trip saw dozens of students strip naked in the snow and perform “outrageous” tasks as they competed to win a free holiday.
The Valley Rally competition, sponsored by luxury holiday company Scott Dunn, offered a free 5-star skiing holiday worth £2,000 in Saint Anton, Austria, for the winning team.
Teams took part in challenges such as smashing an egg “in the most creative manner possible,” eating buckets of snow and posing for “adventurous” photographs.
The winning team, all from St Anne’s College, placed an egg between the buttocks of one team member while another smashed it with a wine bottle. At the end of the challenge the team ate the egg.
They also posed for erotic pictures on the slopes whilst naked, covered in pasta sauce and hot chocolate, in front of a crowd of 500 people.
Despite attracting criticism from some for their behaviour, the team said they were glad to have won the competition.
One team member said, “I think I may have got hypothermia but it was definitely worth it.”
Another member of the winning team, said, “I sold my dignity for a free holiday.”
The top three teams in the competition were all from Oxford, and the runners up drank each other’s urine. Students were also seen to strip naked to pose for photographs in snow drifts and to simulate sex acts on one another.
One Varsity rep described how he believed he had witnessed students “losing their souls” while competing.
Another rep, from tour company Off the Piste, said that she had been surprised at the willingness of participants to take their clothes off, especially given the freezing conditions and the presence of photographers.
A video of the Valley Rally has since been posted on YouTube, where one girl can be seen with her top off.
In another round, where the task was to eat as much snow as possible from a bucket in one minute, a group of Cambridge students requested to be allowed to urinate in the snow before consuming it, “for extra points.”
A member of the group told Cherwell, “It was disappointing to make such an effort early on and then not to win. It makes it feel like it was all a bit pointless.”
A large number of students originally signed up for the Valley Rally, but a high proportion dropped out when the nature of the competition became clear.
The event had been marketed to students on the Varsity 2010 website with the tagline, “Make sure you don’t miss out on this great afternoon on the slopes.”
According to a spokeswoman for Scott Dunn, the company choose to sponsor the Valley Rally as they saw Oxbridge students as a “great audience for a high end operator like themselves.”
When contacted by Cherwell, Scott Dunn seemed unaware of the nature of the competition, and said they had believed that were sponsoring a “fun ski race.”
The week-long trip to Val Thorens, in the French Alps, was also marked by another incident, when one of the coaches travelling from Oxford on the last day of term was involved in a serious collision on the M25.
44 students, mostly from New College and Oriel, were on board the coach when it crashed head-on into a lorry at approximately 2 o’clock in the morning. Treacherous weather conditions had forced the lorry to skid into the opposite lane.
Almost all passengers on the coach suffered cuts and bruising, and several were taken to hospital for further treatment. The driver of the coach suffered a broken leg and a broken wrist.
The collision occurred at Clacket Lane, near Croydon. Having been evacuated from the coach, the students were marshalled into a service station, where they spent three hours giving statements to the police and being assessed by ambulance crews.
The service station’s hotel provided students with rooms, and in the morning they were transferred to a new coach to continue their journey.
A number of students expressed their thanks to the coach driver, whose quick braking prevented the accident from being potentially far worse.
Travelling to France proved difficult for all the skiers, as coaches and planes left amidst MET Office warnings of extreme weather conditions and “widespread icy roads.”
‘First-lift’ customers, who had paid extra to fly out to France early, were frustrated to be told that they would not be able to board their flights and would instead have to travel by coach.
