NEWS
Reinsurance meeting delegates head for the Baden mountains
A group of attendees kept up a Baden-Baden reinsurance meeting tradition said to have been going for more than 20 years.
A sporty or perhaps sportive slice of Brit’s Baden-Baden team, together with a smattering of market friends, set off on Sunday morning for a roughly 30-mile mountain bike course through the surrounding hills, adding 2023 to a tradition said to have been going for more than 20 years.
“This is a gorgeous place,” Simon Bird of Brit said of the German spa that has hosted the reinsurance gathering since it grew out of the German marine conference in 1979. “People come and just touch the surface of it,” he says of the gathering’s circa 3,000 participants.
Bird, now at his 30th Baden-Baden congress, took his initial cue from Ulysse Re’s Hugo Barker who suggested the idea some two or three years after the duo had their first Baden-Baden meetings under their belts.
“I think I’ve done this a good 20 times.”
Simon Bird, Brit
The ride count is not official, but “I think I’ve done this a good 20 times,” Bird said. Barker’s count: “beyond memory”. Bird has done one to two years on his own, Barker has joined the vast bulk of the remainder, and the duo claim a standard count of between six and 10 riders.
With retirement planned, there’s just one more ride—in 2024—to be marked on the Bird lifetime count. From the 2023 team, Archie Mainwaring-Burton claims the next-highest count at six or seven.
The 2023 route, picked from a list of available options tried over the years, headed east from Baden-Baden to the Merkur peak then south towards the Badener Höhe peak, with plans to fulfil a tradition for a “hearty lunch” at Scherrhof.
The group chooses from a selection of sights along the way including the Alte Schloss (Old Castle) above Baden-Baden and Schloss Eberstein near Gernsbach.