Bristol Uni team win in ‘tight’ quarter-final of University Challenge

Bristol University’s team won 135-95 last night against the Open University

3 hours ago

Students at the University of Bristol have excelled in the first of their University Challenge quarter-finals, winning greatly against the Open University.

This comes after already thrashing Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Exeter to reach the quarterfinals.

Last night’s episode (3rd March) saw the Bristol team behind their competitors by 10 points.

However, with only five minutes to go, the talented students pulled the game back to win a massive 135-95. The team grasped the win by answering complicated questions on Shakespeare and the Polish artist Jan Matejko,

The presenter of the BBC show, Amol Rajan, gave his commiserations to the Open University team, saying that it was a “ludicrously tight and really quite a stressful game.”

Bristol team’s was strong on questions about the Aeneid and bacterial reproduction, yet struggled on questions about George Eliot’s Middlemarch and family trees in Russian novels.

The team is made up of MSci biology student Ted Warner, medicine student Bridie Rogers, artificial intelligence PhD student Kevin Flanagan (captain) and organic chemistry PhD student Olivia Watts. The team’s reserve player is MSci biology student Nathaniel Joyce.

So strong were their performances in those episodes that, at the beginning of the quarter-final match, Amol said: “Across their [Bristol’s] two matches so far, their average score has been just shy of 310, and their opponents’ average score a little less than 60.

“In round two they shut out entirely a capable team from Exeter for almost two-thirds of the game, taking every one of the first 10 starters, and converting more than 70 per cent of the bonuses that followed on topics ranging from plant biology to Chinese provinces.”

The team will compete in their second quarterfinal match in the coming weeks.