‘There’s a reason they’re called the Friendly Games’

ARRIVING only just in time at the airport to greet the Froya team, after a busy morning of work, it struck me that I’d had four years to prepare for this moment. I’d volunteered to be an Island Games attache back in 2019 when the Games were due to be in 2021.

Although, to be fair, I’d only discovered a few days earlier that the Froya team were arriving on the 6th, a day before most teams. They were also leaving a day later than most, on the Sunday, which was an issue as their accommodation was only booked until the Saturday.

As the 36-strong Froya team came through the arrival doors in their blue tracksuits I spotted Marit, who I’d met at the International Island Games Association AGM in Guernsey the previous year when she was secretary of Froya’s Island Games association. Now the chairwoman, she was accompanied by the new secretary, Mona. The two of them were our VIPs, and my role along with my fellow Froya attache, Gail Falla, was to look after their local transportation needs for the week.

Or so we thought… Driving Marit and Mona to sporting events and briefings was the easy part. What was not so easy to handle was their disappointment with their accommodation at Les Maingys. Somewhere along the way there had been a mismatch between what they were expecting and what was on offer to them. It didn’t help that it was a hot day and the temperature in the rooms where they were staying was in the mid-30s.

That first day felt very stressful as Gail and I answered questions, made phone calls, tried to sort out the air conditioning, and negotiated over sleeping arrangements. Fortunately, Julia Bowditch, the Games director, had found a house in Vazon for the six women in the team. But Marit and Mona didn’t want to abandon the others and it was eventually decided that the eight-strong badminton team would move instead and Gail and I drove them there. They were delighted with their new accommodation and asked us not to tell the rest of the team how nice it was.

The same afternoon I took Marit and Mona to the supermarket for the first of several trips as they stocked up on provisions for their hungry footballers. They were keen to self-cater as much as possible to keep costs down.

Laundry could have been a challenge but Peter Foote, football attache for the Falkland Islands as well as Froya, was a superstar, taking home and washing the footballers’ kit after each match. He also stepped in when their 17-year-old footballer Trym broke his leg on the first day in a training session collision with a fellow player. Trym was in the PEH for several days, with Peter taking the football team managers to and fro to visit him.

Gail and I had decided to split each day into two shifts – 6am to 2pm and 2pm to 10pm – which worked well and meant we each got some time to see other sporting events and, in my case, to catch up on work. The early shift involved taking Marit and Mona to Beau Sejour for the 7am managers’ briefing, a chance to catch up with other bleary-eyed attaches as we waited for our charges to emerge from the briefing.

As the week went on, the team got used to their accommodation and by the end of the Games, Les Maingys was ‘home’. It helped that people with huge pressures on their time, such as Julia and Wayne Bulpitt, as well as the Les Maingys team, went out of their way to resolve the issues they faced.

So, having dealt with the challenges, what were my highlights from the week?

There’s a reason they call them the ‘Friendly Games’. One highlight came when watching two of my team, Anne-Brit and Inga-Lil, in the badminton ladies’ doubles. They were clearly outclassed by the Isle of Man pair who won the first game 15-2 in no time. Realising they were going to win easily, the Manx women decided to keep the rallies going in the second game, eventually winning it 15-6. Anne-Brit and Inga-Lil were all smiles at the end, thanking their opponents and saying how much they had learned from the experience.

And, as a natural show-off, I have to admit that another highlight was carrying the Froya sign for the team as we progressed along the seafront at the opening ceremony in front of a cheering crowd.

I used to travel to Norway for work and have always found the Norwegians friendly and kind. It was lovely to get to know Marit and Mona well, comparing our lives here in Guernsey with theirs in Froya. They’d brought us gifts from Froya, including beautiful Scandinavian-style mittens, knitted by Marit.

I also had great conversations with other team members at events and when driving them around. The main thing that surprised, and occasionally terrified, them about Guernsey was our roads: ‘In Froya we just have one road that runs along the coastline. Why do you have so many tiny roads?’

More insights into life in Froya came from taking 19-year-old footballer Gabriel to and from the excellent medical centre at Beau Sejour after he got third-degree sunburn on his shoulders while on the beach on the first Saturday.

Like many of his 5,000 fellow islanders, he works in fishing. His pride in his work obvious, he showed me the photo on his phone’s lock screen of the trawler on which he goes to sea for a month at a time, travelling to the salmon fish farms to collect and clean the fish before returning to the island.

We also got to know Svein, the only golfer in the team, driving him to L’Ancresse for his matches. Froya’s friendly rivalry with their neighbour island Hitra reminded me of our own with Jersey – Svein was thrilled with his 68th position overall, as the two Hitra players had come 69th and 70th.

It had been a full-on week, but I was sad to see the team off at the airport at 6am on the Sunday. Mona handed me a Froya team shirt as a parting gift. ‘You can just wear it as your pyjamas,’ she said.

I’m wearing it with pride.