Menu
Menu
It’s that time of year again! Or, well, a little later than usual, but still: At the end of August, we sent 4 teams and 5 judges over to Burgas in Bulgaria for the Black Sea European Universities Debating Championships (EUDC) 2023. As one might expect from that name, the first thing most of us did after arriving at our hotel was to head down to the beach for a swim.
Inrounds were as fun as they were challenging – not just because it was Euros, but also due to the extra challenge of dealing with the heat in the debate rooms. Luckily, we braved through it without too much trouble, always taking the time to relax at the end of the day – be it by eating too spicy chilis or learning traditional Bulgarian dances in a fishing village.
By the final day, things were going fairly well – Umut, despite this being his first competition as a judge, was never given trainee status, Theo and Liam were being placed as panellists in break relevant rooms, and three of our teams (Marina and Paula, Adora and Mira, Aleks and Anton) still had a chance of breaking by the final inround.
At the break night social in a club down by the harbour, it turned out that neither our teams nor our judges made it to the outrounds. Given how competitive both breaks were this year, though, we were largely happy to have even gotten this far and dusted ourselves off pretty quickly, with with most of us either cheering on Berlin in the outrounds or returning to a life of beach on Thursday and rejoining the finals and festivities on Friday.
In the end, as schmaltzy as it sounds, the most important part of Euros is the part you can’t ever really do justice in text – coming together, both as a club and as the debating community, for this big event and celebrating. So, while we’re of course also very proud of how our club did, we’re mainly also just happy to have found such a great community and that we’re part of such a great larger one as well!
If you’re interested in the motions and stats, here’s the tab in all its juicy goodness!
