Jailbreak 2018 winners reach Santa Cruz de la Palma

This year’s Jailbreak has finished, with the winners travelling 2952.10 kilometres and reaching Santa Cruz de la Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. 

The team, named ‘Team Blue Waffle’, consisted of Paula Tel Hidalgo, a first-year Economics student, and Lennart Greiner, an exchange student in the School of Law.

This year’s Jailbreak was a part of Warwick RAG Week, which took place throughout Week 5. The ‘jailbreakers’ set off on the morning of Saturday 10 February and the winners were announced this evening.

Jailbreak is an annual event which sees teams of two to four Warwick students attempt to travel as far away from Warwick’s campus as possible in 36 hours. Participants are forbidden from using their own money and must instead rely on the generosity of the public, either through monetary donations or lifts.

This year the event was in aid of Newlife, a charity which helps disabled and terminally ill children across the UK. The exact figure is yet to be confirmed, but RAG has revealed to The Boar that Jailbreak has raised at least £4,500.

Jailbreak is an annual event which sees teams of two to four Warwick students attempt to travel as far away from Warwick’s campus as possible in 36 hours

RAG Event Organiser Hannah McAloone stated: “We got on board with Jailbreak this year after it was pushed back from Term 1 and it needed some more support to run. It was the perfect opportunity to run it during RAG Week. It might have been smaller than in previous years but all of the team members did amazingly well with the winning team somehow reaching the Canary Islands. They have raised a huge amount for their chosen charity.”

To reach Santa Cruz de la Palma, ‘Team Blue Waffle’ raised money by going door-to-door in Canley before catching a Megabus to Manchester and a train from Manchester Piccadilly train station to Manchester Airport, where they waited over 12 hours before raising sufficient funds to catch a flight to the Canary Island city.

The runners up were team ‘Don’t send us back to Coventry’ who travelled 1440.30 by reaching Stockholm in Sweden and team ‘Wally and Wendy!’ who travelled 959.00 km by reaching Geneva in Switzerland.

Last academic year’s winners, team ‘Aeli Hit the Road’, travelled the furthest in over a decade by covering 7658.87 kilometres to Oman on the Arabian Peninsula.