Olympics Reading Challenge: Final results and prizes

This summer several of our readers joined us in a reading challenge based on the Summer Olympics. Readers were put into teams of 5 participants and each team worked together to select countries for each Olympic event. Olympic events were paired up with book categories. For example, weightlifting event was paired with “read a book over 600 pages.” There were 24 events and each team had to find books that would match the country they sponsored and the book category. It was a pretty work intensive challenge and Book Worm and I were impressed by how well each team did in terms of selecting their countries and finding books that matched both the country and the sports/book category. Four of the five teams completed all 24 categories and stretched their reading to find some crazy matches — a Kazakhstan philosophy-themed book! Today it’s time to announce the winners of our various prizes.

Scores for each team were determined based on how well the team’s sponsored countries performed during the Olympics. You can check out the countries each team picked on our challenge page.

Scoreboard:
First place: Citius, Altius, Fortius (Sally, Tracy, Kate, Charisma, & Lana) with 415 points
Second place: No. 5 is alive (Jan, Anna, Renee, Arlene, Cindy) with 364 points
Third place: The Rio Readers (Kings of the Road Trip, Care, Nicole, Rachel, Tanya) with 361 points
Fourth place: Sporting Chance (Karen, Jennifer P, Susie, Andrea, & Natalie) with 320 points
Fifth place: Pheidippedes Pages (Jolene, Nicole, Valerie, Taryn, & Jen) with 295 points

Congrats to all our teams for reading some tough categories and for your creative thinking! And now onto the prizes.

Grand prize (person on the winning team with most points): Tracy & Charisma. Technically, the winner is Tracy since Charisma submitted her final two book reviews 40 mins past the deadline. However, Tracy was kind enough to agree to split the prize since Charisma did post at least one of those reviews prior to midnight on goodreads. Tracy and Charisma get to split a 10 pack of books. I will contact you both separately to work out the prizes. Lana and Sally will each get a $5 amazon gift card.

Consolation prize (person on the second place team with highest points): Jan H wins a $25 Amazon gift card. I will send it to you via Amazon UK.

Overall scorer: Kate from team Citius Altius, Fortius. Kate was the winner for grant prize too but since we only award one prize each, she was able to select which prize she preferred (grand prize of 1o-pack or the overall prize) and she selected this one. She wins a personalized box of bookish goodies. I will post a picture of what she received on my instagram page after she receives it.

Take one for the team prize: For this prize, each team nominated members they thought helped out their team in some way, whether by helping moderate or organize, reading a book no one else wanted to read, or simply stepping in with some extra work. I then entered the nominated names into random.org in order to select the winner. The nominees for each team were:
Team 1: Care
Team 2: Val
Team 3: Natalie
Team 4: Lana
Team 5 Arlene

Please note that some teams nominated more than one person but I only listed the person who received the most votes from their team. And the winner is…

Arlene from team No. 5 is alive! She wins a poster from the Literary company. Please send me an email so we can coordinate and you can pick your poster.

So congrats to all the winners! We hope every0ne had fun. I had a blast seeing all your creative choices. Stay tuned for our next challenge to be announced next month based on Chutes and Ladders. This will be an individual reading challenge and hopefully fun and less work intensive than this one. We hope you join us for that!

Participants: share your challenge experiences. Which books were the most challenging to find or read? Which books did you enjoy the most?