On July 14th, 2007, on the territory of Aksai clove, Beeline; a trademark of the Kar-Tel company, organized a corporate Olympiad: BEELINE Extreme Season 2007, in which 12 of the most active and creative representatives from GRATA and GRATA AUDIT participated.




Peter Neenan, GRATA lawyer, expresses his impressions.

"It was a gloriously sunny day as the GRATA Team gathered to attend the Beeline Extreme Season Event 2007. Attendees included the full range of companies with whom Beeline has developed a relationship: from lawyers to journalists, and of course, a brewery. As our minibus trundled along the bumpy mountain passes on its way to the site of the event, the GRATA Team was deep in discussion. We had been charged with the task of creating some form of welcome chant which we would sing upon our arrival and at various times during the course of the day. Through the cacophony of babbling Russian voices something was starting to take form; a chorus, a clap, and then finally after the passing of the scrap of paper on which the ditty had been scrawled amongst its various pens and a few fine tweaks, we had our tune!

The event itself was essentially a fairly straight-forward affair. Groups lined up as a comedian poked comic fun at everything they said while setting out the course of the events: Teams do challenges; the best team wins a prize. It was a faultless plan and one which had worked a thousand times before and would a thousand times hence. As it came to GRATA’s turn to sing their song, they did so with loud voices and great pride albeit with a degree of miming by the Englishman of the group. It is this writer’s opinion that the GRATA ditty was in fact the best chant there.

After a brief lunch of a piece of bread with a slice of cheese, our stomachs were in no way full but we began regardless. The series of events that we were going to take part in were to take place in a large field and the various groups streamed onto the field to take their places. The comedian was back and he issued various curious warm up procedures including walking massages and imitation dancing. Odd. But we were warm; well, the 40 degree heat has assured us of that fact regardless. But limbs supple and minds focused we adorned our free kit we had been supplied with: XXL fits all, hmm… The event was to consist of five events: A balancing test on a seesaw with balloons and nails (it was less like a form of Inquisition torture than that description renders it); a quad-bike challenge; a ‘get the hoops on the little uprights sticking out of the ground’ challenge; an open pipe water-passing challenge; and a ‘move the giant letter ‘A’ up the course by pivoting it on various coloured blocks’ challenge.  Plus we had to make a flag. GRATA’s performance was pretty spectacular on all challenges with the exception of the letter ‘A’ challenge on which we failed miserably. The flag was a play on the word butterfly – which adorned the tokens we had to collect – and featured a combination of the GRATA symbol and a butterfly with the word GRATAFLY emblazoned above the picture. Clever, eh? Well despite the fact that we probably deserved to, we didn’t win. In fact I think we came about 4th out of 6 or so teams. This writer suspects there must have been cheating from all other teams if we were not to win.

After the announcement of the winner and the prize giving of champagne, balloons were released to celebrate the day and everybody sat down for a spot of well deserved lunch. After lunch there were various activities including zorbing, shooting, quad-biking, darts, rope bridge traversing and a whole host of other activities to partake in. The volleyball game was particularly amusing since the court lay on the zorbing path, resulting in frantic scrabbling by volleyballers to avoid the 8 foot tall bounding ball frequently bearing down upon them! With the sun beating down, after a few hours of activities, it was time for the secondary prize giving and a chance to nurse the sunburn. Finally GRATA received recognition with one member of GRATA’s team nabbing a prize for sharp shooting: a sterling effort. A spot of dancing accompanied by some tribalistic drumming and the day was through. Tired and content the teams traveled home.

All in all it was an excellent day out and GRATA would like to thank you Beeline for providing it!"