Oxford students participating last weekend in Jailbreak, a RAG-organised event, raised over £25,000 for charity, with two teams reaching the United Arab Emirates.
The event involved teams consisting of two or three students attempting to travel as far away from Oxford as possible in 36 hours, without spending any money. This year, 65 teams participated, collectively travelling a total of 60,000km. The average distance for each individual team was 915km.
R AG Events Officer and Jailbreak Team Leader Olivia Phelan told Cherwell, “Jailbreak has gone really well this year thanks to the great team working on it and all the participants. I was surprised at how well so many of the teams did, with the majority leaving the UK.”
OUSU President Louis Trup, one of those volunteering, commented, “This is the kind of thing that OUSU is all about, and I loved being involved, even if it meant sitting in the OUSU building at 6am on Sunday morning.”
The group that covered the most distance, Team GMT, travelled 5562.79km from Oxford, finishing in Sharjah Emirate, just 4.9km north-east of the runners-up in Dubai.
Max Hayward, one of the three members of Team GMT, explained, “We literally had no idea what we were doing on Friday night, so we got in touch with the CEO of lastminute.com because my teammate knows him a bit.
“He said he’d see what he could do but we weren’t expecting too much. We got a text a couple of hours later saying ‘Is Dubai alright?’ We were so excited. We were dancing around the room and we had a couple of celebratory shots.”
Commenting on those teams that pre-arranged travel prior to the event’s official start time, St. Cross postgraduate Mark Smith said, “I don’t think that’s in the spirit of it really.”
Relatively International ESTcape, another participating team, finished the weekend in Graz, Austria, after a spell of hitch-hiking.
Team member Sarah Shao told Cherwell, “We were so lucky. So much of it [hitchhiking] is about being in the right place at the right time. Standing there in the snow in Graz, it was nice to reflect on what we had been through.”
Wadham student Olivia Braddock, who ended up in Amsterdam, commented, “After we’ve finished University, we’re not going to remember writing an essay but we will remember something like this. I’d rather be an essay behind and do Jailbreak.”
Further Jailbreak stories relayed to Cherwell include students being given free plane tickets from the CEO of easyJet after correctly guessing his email address, undergraduates being given a ride on a private plane to the south of France, and a postgraduate student from Kellogg College reaching Berlin dressed as Tigger, despite being on crutches.
RAG President Molly Gilmartin said that the increased media coverage of Jailbreak this year indicated growing support for RAG’s work, remarking, “It is clear that people are sensing their personal responsibility to achieve positive impact and it is great that RAG can facilitate people raising huge amounts for charity which will achieve huge impact whilst also having a lot of fun.”
