Tour Eucor Marks 20th Anniversary

For the 20th anniversary of the Tour Eucor, scheduled for 6 to 10 June 2017, 120 participants will complete a nearly 900-kilometer trinational cycling tour between the cities of the European Campus. Student, employee, and alumni participants from the five Eucor universities will start in Karlsruhe on 6 June and pass through Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Basel, and Freiburg on their way back to Karlsruhe, where the tour will end on 10 June with an anniversary celebration and the Eucor Festival.

"We are delighted that the Tour Eucor has been breathing life into the idea of cross-border cooperation and intercultural team spirit for 20 years now," says Benjamin Litz from the organizational team. The first edition of the tour in 1998 had a mere 15 participants. "The goals are to take on athletic challenges and make new friends. We want to put the idea of the alliance and a common Europe into practice and experience it together." The tour is organized by the student Tour Eucor association at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The organizational team is made up of students and alumni from the five member universities of Eucor – The European Campus.

Those participating in the anniversary edition of the tour can choose between six routes of varying degrees of difficulty. Depending on how ambitious and physically fit they are, they can complete a distance of between 560 and 920 kilometers and overcome an elevation gain of between 2100 and 12,560 meters in the course of the five days. The longest stage is from Strasbourg to Mulhouse, at a distance of 214 kilometers and with an elevation gain of 2400 meters. The steepest passages the cyclists have to negotiate are on the climb to the Grand Ballon in the Vosges; another highlight is the climb to the summit of Hochblauen in the Black Forest. The anniversary tour will conclude with the Eucor Festival on the campus of KIT, featuring a music program with a total of seven student bands from the five Eucor cities and a student photography exhibition. Food and drinks will be available for purchase at concession stands.

As a new feature this year, friends and family of participants can stay up to date with where the various groups are located with live GPS tracking on the Tour Eucor website: www.tour-eucor.org.

The Stages of Tour Eucor 2017
This year's Tour Eucor includes the following stages:

6 June: Karlsruhe -> Strasbourg
7 June: Strasbourg -> Mulhouse
8 June: Mulhouse -> Basel
9 June: Basel -> Freiburg
10 June: Freiburg -> Karlsruhe

Information on the Eucor Festival
The Eucor Festival will be held on the campus of KIT [Culture and Communication Working Group (AKK), KIT, Paulckeplatz 1, 76131 Karlsruhe] on 10 June from 5 to 11 p.m., after the final stage of the cycling tour. The open-air festival is free of charge. A free shuttle bus is available to take students from the Eucor universities to the festival. If you are interested in taking the shuttle bus, please sign up by 2 June. Visit www.eucor-uni.org for more information.

Background Information on Eucor – The European Campus
The European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) Eucor – The European Campus evolved in the course of a longstanding partnership between the universities on the Upper Rhine. In December 2015 the five member universities – the University of Basel, the University of Freiburg, the University of Upper Alsace, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the University of Strasbourg – signed the founding documents to give the international research and teaching alliance its own legal personality. The aim of the alliance is to form a cross-border science and research area with an international reach, pooling the competence and potential of 15,000 researchers, 15 doctoral candidates, and 115,000 students.

More Information
www.eucor-uni.org
www.tour-eucor.org

Contact:
Press Officer of Eucor – The European Campus
Nathalie Schnabel
Phone: +49 (0)761 / 203 4282
E-Mail: Nathalie.Schnabel@pr.uni-freiburg.de