The EDHEC Cup 2007 at a glance:

Official website: www.ccedhec.com

1st European sporting event for students 180 yachts
110 Land Trophy teams
10 nationalities  
11, 000 sq.m village
Over 1,5 hours of TV and radio broadcasting
500 press articles 10,000 visitors €2.5 million  of sponsoring
300,000 web pages
 

This sailing competition dedicated to students and companies alike, is more than a simple sailing event. Over and above the daily regattas over the week, a Land Trophy takes place simultaneously, enabling 110 teams of five members compete in different sports such as mountain biking, canoeing, abseiling and horse riding.

At the end of the day's sport,  every competitor is welcomed to the 11,000 square metre village, set up temporarily in the most prestigious harbour of the French Atlantic Coast: Brest.  To close it all at night-fall, a lively party joins together more than 4000 students for an evening of fun and dancing.

But the EDHEC Cup is not only the biggest European sporting event for students; it is also an exceptional training experience for future managers.

The EDHEC Cup is a two-year project for the fifty students who are responsible for its organisation and members of the EDHEC Cup student association. They are all first and second-year students in the Master in Management programme of EDHEC Business School. The association is organised into seventeen units around three departments: the Sports Department, the Logistics Department and the Communication Department and is in fact run in the same was as a company.  By systematically pairing off a first-year student with a second-year student, the knowledge that has been gained over the course of time is passed on to the next generation.

The operation starts ten months before the event by choosing a location for the regattas and coming to an agreement with a port which has all the necessary infrastructures. The location has to be able to accommodate 220 boats, a "village" for 6000 people and have an area of countryside for the  Land Trophy events.

Through the organisation of this regatta, the members of the EDHEC Cup Association learn real-life management skills. They gain a true hands-on experience to complement the subjects learned at EDHEC. They manage a budget of €1.4 million, an amount considerably higher than that of the average small or medium sized enterprise and at the same time, they apply in practice everything they have learned about management. They also have contacts with the business world thanks to the sponsorship.  

Two kinds of sponsors are attracted by the EDHEC Cup, those who support the different crews by putting their name on a sail or a spinnaker (more than 400), and those who fund the event itself. Last year, the crews collected a total of 2.5 million euros from sponsors. The companies (among them names such as Ernst & Young, HSBC, Xerox, Colgate Palmolive) that support the organization as official partners give financial contribution, supply computer equipment, drinks and food or deliver a specific service such as radio and television coverage. Last year the official sponsors accounted for 18% of the total budget, while 59% of the budget came from the registration fees. The other 22% came from the earnings from the additional activities (15%) and public sponsoring (8%).

The organisation of the EDHEC Cup is also an incomparable experience for its fifty members, who live two years of passion and challenge in a strong team spirit.