Cambridgeshire Competes is a partnership between museums and sports centres across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to work together to explore the tangible and hidden history of the county’s connections to the past and future Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The project will create an exhibition trail across the county utilising museums inspiring collections to explore local champions and heroes, and the excellent designated collections’ fascinating and quirky insights into different aspects of the Olympic story. The story of the classical Olympics will be told at the University Museum of Classical Archaeology illustrated by selected plaster casts from the collections. We will explore at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Science how the raw materials of the metals are used for the medals, and in some of the paralympic aids such as titanium prosthetic limbs, and high tech equipment like carbon fibre cycles and rowing boats.
A photographic record will be made of rising sports stars from the County and potential Olympic competitors, a future heritage asset for the county archives highlighting the achievements of these young people. In conjunction to the exhibition linked events will be held at museums and sports centres across Cambridgeshire based on the Cambridgeshire Competes theme, to encourage the local community to learn about Olympic history and explore local connections to the Olympics through talks and family activities.
The project will also draw on hidden history brought in by members of the public, their memories of the Olympics in the past, their experiences as spectators, their sporting heroes. Resulting in archive material, oral history and photographs collected at special memory day events at sports centres and museums – all captured forever to add to the heritage collections through the MLA ‘People’s Record’ website and the Cambridgeshire Archives. We also want to capture a record of the Mozambique National team during their stay in Cambridgeshire at their Olympic Training Camp, and engage the Portuguese Community in Fenland collecting their sporting memories of the Olympics.
This wide ranging project will help encourage pride in our local sporting achievements, generate local support for the Olympics and hopefully inspire young people to develop an interest in competing.
