Claire Tayler

I have been thinking about championships this year. It’s been 10 years since I stumbled into my first messenger championships in Copenhagen and Paris, feeling perhaps the most shy I’ve ever felt.

I helped organise the European Messenger Championship @ecmc2026 this year in Berlin along with a team of around 15 people. And in the run-up, somewhere between schlepping boxes, thinking about everything that’s changed in the last 10 years, riding around feeling magic thinking about everyone soon to descend onto Berlin, there was also time for a happy cry in the kitchen. The championship itself is a blur of busyness to the point I can barely remember half the faces I saw, but going to other championships since it has had a certain extra sweetness.

I find myself looking at old championship photos and realising that I now know more faces in the photos than when I took them. How all these little trips have helped pad out and colour in all the details of these old photos.

The way I experience community and feel friendship has changed, my understanding of the effort that we put into things, the value of building things, my understanding of love, and how I hold people a little tighter in my heart when we say see you soon. It cannot all come from championships but it has definitely been changed by them. What an honour.