On a spring day on UBC’s Point Grey campus, Cookie Monster, Winnie the Pooh, a Minion, and a penguin hoist a student over a 12-foot wall. They’re Team Storm the Onesie, and they’re just one team of hundreds competing in Storm the Wall, a beloved multi-day annual spectacle held since 1978.
As the largest intramural event in North America, the 2024 event drew an estimated 4,000 participants. Each team member must conquer at least one event in a relay of biking, distance running, sprinting, and swimming; the entire team must make it over the wall. The camaraderie and the seeming impossibility of the task – anyone who’s seen the wall up close knows it looks imposing – attracts the most intrepid students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members. They compete in teams with names like Not Fast, Just Furious; Women in Male-Dominated Fields and Bill; and Retired but Not Tired.
Then there are the rare ambitious competitors, who take on the relay course alone and scale the wall unassisted. If they succeed, they claim the title of “Iron Legend.” Dominic Janus, one of only two Iron Legends in 2023, attributed his success at the wall to his biology fieldwork as a graduate student. His research is “pretty physical,” he told The Ubyssey, with “a lot of pounding wood into the mud to build fences.” Storm the Wall was just one stop in his busy day: before his victory on campus, he’d spent the morning catching geese in Delta.
The intrepid spirit of the competitors is equally essential for the UBC Recreation staff and hundreds of volunteers running the event. Sophie Bockhold (BSc’17), a former UBC Rec events director, recalls standing outside for hours one soggy Storm the Wall to check in participants. Her shoes filled with water, and by the end of the day her feet had turned a fiery red, with a burning sensation to match. A Google search of her symptoms yielded an at-home diagnosis: she had a mild case of trench foot.
Bockhold found her affliction hilarious, taking it as proud evidence of her own and her colleagues’ outrageous dedication to Storm the Wall – dedication that required round-the-clock enthusiasm. Until recently, it was tradition for volunteers to take shifts camping overnight in a van by the wall, defending it from pranksters (in the 1980s, someone burned the wall down) and protecting the overzealous from themselves (students in various states of sobriety try to scale the wall in the dead of night). “We’d yell at people to get down,” Bockhold recalls. “It was surprisingly busy.”
