Daring students help raise €60k in race to Slovenia
More than €60k was raised in the process, going towards Saint Vincent de Paul and Amnesty International. The winners, Hugh Weldon and Ahmed Mu’azzam, were one of 88 teams that took part in the contest, and one of around 20 teams to make the final destination. Traditionally, the event requires participants to travel as far from Ireland as possible, but this year the rules were a little different.
“They changed the format of the competition this year because last year the winners got to Sydney and you can’t really get any further away than Sydney so they had to rethink it,” said Hugh, speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland.
“This year they decided to announce a mystery destination on the morning of the event so you couldn’t really have anything planned.
“Then you just had to try and get there without taking flights that were longer than two hours and without flying out of a country you flew into,” he said.
On Saturday morning, the duo were given their first piece of location information — they would need to high-tail it to somewhere on the Balkan Peninsula as soon as possible. After some last-minute fundraising on the streets of Dublin, Hugh and Ahmed cobbled together enough money to gain passage to Paris and begin their journey in earnest.
Making it to Charles de Gaulle Airport, the students said this was the most difficult point of the journey as they had to try raise more funds with only a limited amount of French.
However, Hugh and Ahmed powered through and managed to get a flight to Ljubljana, while 14 other competitors took a bus from Berlin. They then took a taxi to Lake Bled to find Aisling, the Jailbreak representative and found her six minutes ahead of the next team.
For more information, go to www.jailbreakhq.org or text JAILBREAK to 50300 to donate €4.
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