1500 weeks of Sport

This is it, then. The big one. The one you’ve all been waiting for. I don’t know about the rest of the Felix team, but I hope you have as much fun reading this one as us editors down here have had doing it.

I also hope you enjoyed the back cover, which was the fruit of quite a bit of trawling through the archives, looking for nuggets of sport through all the years Felix has been active.

It turns out that the place of sport in this newspaper has ebbed and flowed over the years, with some editors giving it plenty of space, nice graphics and decent pictures. Other times, it’s hastily collated in at the bottom of a page, with about three results and 50-word reports. For the first fifteen or so years of existence, Felix even had a late news supplement, which was basically a couple of typewritten pages sent out on Friday afternoon ─ it’s a shame that doesn’t exist any more, it would be a godsend for getting results in.

Since the beginning, though, we’ve not been renowed as a sporting uni (although that is starting to change), and browsing the archives makes you realise how little has changed through the years: Imperial students are unmistakebly Imperial students, whether its 1959 or 2009 (as you can see in this week’s Hangman, we still have the same sense of humour. The sportspeople tend to remain the same, too. There are always the Rugby and Hockey lot, up for a laugh; Rowing, who have been getting up at obscene hours to train since time immemorial and then successes in minor sports (Badminton, Basketball, Fencing and ─ yes ─ Tiddlywinks).

Actually that sport headline from the 70s struck me when I saw it (and is now on the back page). I’m not sure if the editor of the day was taking the piss, or if he really regarded Tiddlywinks as something that enough Imperialites were interested in to print the report. In the pre-WOW and Starcraft days, I guess it must have been. What would people have done to occupy the studying spaces otherwise? You can network a few library tables and have a massively multiplayer Tiddlywinks game, I suppose.

Unfunny attempts at humour aside, though, there has always been a tradition of sport at our beloved university (sorry, I’ll stop now) and Felix has always been there to report on our glowing triumphs and soul-crushing defeats. Thanks to all of you who send your reports in, the section is really hitting its stride now.

On another note, I hope to have the Captains' interviews running on a more regular basis from now on, so if you’re in a club and interested in getting your Captain or President in these pages, drop me an email! Coming soon: Rugby, Rowing and Synchronised Swimming. Cheers!