The games people play!

The Greystones Free House at Sawtry had never had it so good. The beer garden was packed, and a happy crowd of drinkers were making the best of a long June evening. The usual Friday night crowd had been swelled by around 80 personnel from George Wimpey, and crammed behind the tiny bar. Five staff sweated over the pumps in a frantic attempt to keep up with demand.

'What the hell's going on?' asked one bemused regular, finding his customary corner occupied by half a dozen burly youths.

He obviously had not heard about the UK and Ireland Corporate Games being held over the weekend in nearby Peterborough. In the business equivalent to the Olympics, competitors from almost 300 companies had converged on the Fens to take part in 19 different sports ranging from soccer to lawn bowls.

The games began in 1993, and this year attracted a record 5,676 competitors - more than the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh or even the 1948 London Olympics. Entrants from banks, oil companies, computers giants and the like gather to do battle - and cash in on a useful marketing opportunity. After all, what better way to 'bond' with your would-be clients than sharing the sweat and toil of competition with their key managers?

By any standards the contest has become a major sporting event and the 139-strong Wimpey team had come to Peterborough with a mission - to do better than last year - and maybe even to win something.

'Last year was a bit of a disaster,' admitted one Wimpey veteran, offering his story in return for a pint of Flowers and a promise of anonymity. 'A lot of us spent the night before the games under canvas and there was quite a lot of booze and larking about in the tents. It was uncomfortable anyway, and in the...er...party atmosphere nobody got much sleep. I'm afraid it all showed in the performances the next day. As far as I can remember we won virtually nothing.'

This year things were to be different. Most of the team had been put up in a travel lodge on the A1 - thereby guaranteeing a soft bed for the night and a lockable bedroom door. And while Wimpey's squads for some of the events were scratch teams cobbled together a few days previously, others had been practicing hard for weeks.

'Take the dragon boat crew,' said Hugh Snodgrass, commercial director of Wimpey Minerals, 'they have been practising for months - and there is a girl in our office who's taking the badminton so seriously she's been having professional coaching.'

In Peterborough for the golf, Snodgrass (playing off seven) was clearly relaxed and impressed with the effect the games had had on staff. 'It's a terrific motivator. Give people a target and they really make an effort. It is all great fun too.'

Among the Wimpey staff having the fun was Lizzie from the Hammersmith legal department. Wimpey's wing attack in the netball, she counselled against taking the competition too seriously.

'Of course we are going to try hard to win,' she said, gesturing a little extravagantly with glass of vodka and coke, 'but it really is the taking part that counts. There are people here from every part of the company and from all over the country - people you would probably never meet otherwise. It's a really good opportunity to get together and have a good time.'

By closing time the pub beer garden was a ferment of speculation. Tactics had been discussed to the nth degree and confidence was running high. If companies enter the games to improve inter-divisional communication and to foster team spirit, anyone at the Greystones that night could tell you that the sponsorship money (more than œ10,000 to cover costs) had been very well spent.

Saturday dawned bright, blustery and strangely cold for June. The squad, looking surprisingly fresh, mustered in the motel car park at 08.00 hours and grinned obligingly for the official team photograph. Amid much hooting and shouted goodlucks, the entrants then boarded cars and minibuses and headed off to register in the town centre.

By 10.30 a darkening sky was beginning to spit rain, and at the Peterborough rowing club the Dragon boat team sat shivering in its boat. The discovery that the rowing lake (now distinctly choppy) was only four feet deep prompted a last minute change of plan: 'If we include our heaviest crew, the boat scrapes along the bottom - so our fastest times will probably be with a lighter crew.'

Then - disaster. While waiting for starter's orders the Wimpey boat sprung a leak. 'Move into position Wimpey!' bawled the starter. 'We can't! We're sinking!' yelled back one of the crew.

'It's sabotage,' muttered another, glaring at the rival teams from process engineer MW Kellog and Olivetti. Five minutes and several yards of waterproof tape later the three boats are under starter's orders again.

Dragon boats look like war canoes from classical times. At the rear a helmsman steers with a large trailing oar. At the front, the strokes per minute is controlled by a person with a drum. In between about fifteen brawny crew paddle madly, red Indian style.

Perhaps more than any other event, dragon boat racing reveals the most basic side of corporate games. Of course they are about morale and marketing. But once on the water this race was simply a stylised battle between firms - an atavistic contest in the tradition of Rome's gladiators.

At last, the boats were off. They all move very fast. They had all been practising. They all badly wanted to win. Vanessa Gidwani - Wimpey's petite seven-stone drum from corporate development, smashed out a rhythm like the slave driver in Ben Hur.

At the finish it was close. The Wimpey craft hurtled past the Kellog boat and narrowly failed to catch Olivetti - the fancied team. Not a bad performance, reflected captain Grant Kennedy. But this was just the first heat of the day, and much remained to be done.

Two miles away at Walton Comprehensive, Wimpey's netball fixture was a curious battle between financial services experts - a squad drawn from Wimpey's pensions, treasury, and legal departments was preparing to take on the team from Pearl Assurance.

Pearl looked rather hearty and efficient. The Wimpey team looked stylish, even fetching in black leggings and yellow tops. They looked rather less efficient. Blonde Julie Strudwick (attack) drew on a cigarette and admitted she hadn't played in more years than she cared to remember. 'Never mind,' she said cheerfully, 'we'll be so busy trying to remember the rules we'll stop thinking about how cold it is.'

Predictably, it was a massacre. At 11-0 Pearl had the match well and truly wrapped up, but their captain wanted an even bigger winning margin. 'Come on Pearl!' she urged, 'keep it slick!'

'Now that's not going to be too hard, is it?' replied Strudwick sardonically, feeling perhaps that such zeal is a little out of place. Pearl, however, pressed on, ruthlessly exploiting Wimpey's weak defence and eventually running out 20-0 winners.

Later on the team had found some shape and managed to put seven past BP Oil. Captain Melina Taylor said: 'Now we've got together we're going to start a regular team. Who knows what might happen next year?'

Wimpey was finding it tough going in most of the 15 competitions it had entered. But whatever the result, the mood remained positive. Tony Osbond, marketing manager with Wimpey Construction (East Midlands) put a professional gloss on his own disap- pointment in the tennis. 'You could say I came second in each match,' he grinned.

There were some other successes. The effort put in by the badminton team paid handsome dividends with captain Alan Darkins winning bronze in the men's singles. Another three medals were won by doubles teams. Nicola Henderson, a secretary with Wimpey Minerals, said: 'We came up against a lot of league and county players. It was absolutely exhausting - even though I had played a lot of tennis and squash as well as badminton to get into training.' Nicola won a silver in the ladies' doubles, and a bronze in the mixed, beating teams from Texaco, Barlays, and SmithKline Beecham along the way.

Wimpey's Lee Dewhirst and Ramzies Dacres also picked up a bronze in the under-30s ten-pin bowling doubles, though Dewhirst was less than satisfied. 'I didn't go just for the taking part. I was keen to win and if I had bowled as I know I can we could have got an even better result.'

Geraldine Fry, on the other hand could not have done much better, winning gold in the mountain bike competition. Wimpey also won a silver in the road running and collected bronzes for lawn bowls and ten-pin bowls. Surprisingly, there were no medals in the golf despite some outstanding play by the Wimpey entrants. Plant manager at Wimpey Construction, Pat Cunningham, shot a remarkable 65 to break the local course record - and project QS Nigel Athorn came a more than creditable eighth out of almost 400 entrants in the open tournament.

There was success too for the dragon boaters who came seventh place in this, one of the most prestigious and keenly contested team events. Said captain Grant Kennedy: 'We were basically a scratch crew, the practice was a bit hit and miss, and we were up against regular teams like Nuclear Electric who race every week at a national level. But on the day everyone really gave it everything and pulled together brilliantly. We shouted the strokes out to help us along and now we've all lost our voices from yelling!'

'By the later stages of the competition we had attracted quite a bit of support. We couldn't look at the bank because we were concentrating too hard. But we could all hear the crowd shouting for Wimpey and it was great experience. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and can't wait to do it all again next year,' he added.

Saturday ended with all the teams parading through the centre of Peterborough in team colours. By then most of the locals had cottoned on to the event and many went to watch. When the overall results were calculated, Wimpey had managed to come third in its own division and eighth out of the 300 teams that had taken part.

Most of the Wimpey squad boarded the team coach to the Three Horseshoes in Yaxley where Wimpey had laid on a massive barbecue for its gallant competitors. Happily the weather had improved and in the summery beer garden tales of success and near misses were washed down with much cold lager.

Altogether an excellent weekend had been had by all.

The only wonder was that in an event so well patronised by banks, oil companies, power companies, computer companies - in fact blue chips of every description, Wimpey had been the only major contractor to field a big team.