COMPETITIONS AND WINNERS
When the Annual Conferences were first set up, the organisers were at pains to ensure that the contests would encourage a spirit of competition among the participating pupils and students. As the years went by these competitions increased in importance and were gradually improved to become what they are today.
The competitions often prove a headache for the organisers who sometimes have problems finding enough teachers to make up the judging panels. And sometimes achieving the appropriate mix of participants in each team presents them with tricky dilemmas.
Thanks to the Competitions Committee set up several years ago and to the set of guidelines which the Committee produced, problems became less frequent, and have now almost ceased to exist.
In Lisbon there were nine contests on the programme on October 6th-8th, two of them newly created. Seven of the competitions took place in various meeting rooms in the Marriott hotel, while just two of them, requiring a technical infrastructure provided by a kitchen, took place on the premises of the beautiful and newly renovated Lisbon Hotel School.
Hôtel Marriott: bar, restaurant service, management, tourist destination, rooms division, hospitality management, wine service.
Lisbon Hotel School: culinary arts and pastry.
The general view, garnered by talking to a wide range of people, was that the contests were superbly well organised from the point of view both of the judging panels and of the students – with one or two minor exceptions, all of them involving the composition of a team related to a language problem. This is a recurrent problem which Louis Robert, Vice-President responsible for competitions, has undertaken to resolve by next year.
Some views of the various contests
When the results were announced at the end of the gala evening on Saturday October 9th (almost Sunday 10th!) we witnessed as in previous years outpourings of joy from the happy winners, and a few tears from the less fortunate competitors.
Here are the photos of the winners:
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Winners list
We should add that the medals and certificates were presented, to loud applause, by members of the Presidium, joined by His Excellency Paul Schmit, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg’s Ambassador to Lisbon, as well as by Serge Sevaux (Grand Marnier) and Moïse Déglon (Déglon Cutlery Company) who presented several of the winners with some excellent bottles or with equipment cases.
