Prepare Yourself for the European Tram Driving Championships
Forget the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup, the 10th annual TRAM-EM competition is the best thing you’ll watch this weekend
Speed. Agility. Finesse.
The best sports don’t just push athletes to their limits in one area. They test everything, all at once, a nonstop feast of human potential. They require reaction time, fitness, focus.
The European Tram Driving Championships (also known as TRAM-EM) is one of these great competitions.
Wait…what?
Yes, you heard me right. Tomorrow, 25 teams from cities across Europe will converge in Oradea, Romania to crown the greatest public transportation driver on the continent. Now this is the type of motorsport I can get behind.
Now entering its 10th year of competition, the tram drivers are organized by their home city into teams featuring a man and a woman, and over the course of the weekend, they compete in a series of challenges that test their might. In one, they must brake at just the right moment to line up the doors with an arrow (the closer to the arrow, the more points you earn). In another, they drive into huge exercise balls and go “bowling,” trying to knock down pins. There’s a relay race and even a billiards-inspired challenge that requires just the right touch.
It's incredible and all for a good cause. Cities bid each year to host the competition, which not only spotlights the use of public transportation but brings the field’s brightest minds together to focus on safety and promotion. Last year, the drivers from Hannover made a late run to overtake Stockholm for the grand prize as a total of 40,000 fans lined the streets of Lepzig and another 60,000 watched online. Of course the crowds came. I mean, just look at these highlights from last year:
Originally conceived in 2012 to celebrate the 140th anniversary of Dresden’s tram system, organizers quickly realized that there was something more powerful at play here. The annual TRAM-EM competition helps local transportation networks recruit and retain new talent, increase awareness of transit goals (like Helsinki’s ambitious attempt to make private car ownership “obsolete” by 2025), and allow for the exchange of ideas across the industry.
Those are all noble ambitions worthy of an annual trolley pilgrimage, but there’s something else at work as well, something unspoken. I first stumbled across TRAM-EM last year and lost a Saturday watching the livestream. It sounds crazy, I know, but it wasn’t unlike watching the final stretch of a golf tournament, where you become so totally absorbed in the unspooling action that everything else just seems to slip away. The first thing that stood out was the charm: the smiles, the cheers, the imagination of it all. To watch these everyday civil servants have their moment in the spotlight, pulling on their driving gloves (Berlin’s driver favors fingerless ones), gritting their teeth, and yanking on the hand brake to prove they have the quickest stop in the entire continent, I couldn’t help but think that I was witnessing something close to pure joy.
It reminded me of childhood summer days spent with my sisters, seeing who could run up the stairs quicker, or jump higher, or spin around the most times without falling. Sports are the Olympics and the World Cup and the Super Bowl with their bright lights, sponsors, and millions of dollars on the line. But sports are also found in small moments, these micro-competitions where we invent stakes for ourselves and see if we can do just that much better than we ever thought we could: seeing how much you can fit into a single bag of groceries, how far you can shoot water out of the hose while tending the garden, how effortlessly you can parallel park on a crowded street. It’s these made-up contests that give us wonder, a chance to share a moment with a stranger, a chance to stumble into the town’s main square, or find a European YouTube link, and scream and cheer for the tram driver that you—and maybe even they—never knew had so much hidden talent.
The 2023 TRAM-EM livestream begins Saturday, June 3 at 5 a.m. ET and will continue throughout the day. You can watch it here.
⚽ An update from last week’s story: Luton Town FC won on penalties and is heading to the Premier League! You can’t write a story like it.
🎙️ We have a great episode of our new podcast Roughhousing this week. We continue tracking the story of soccer player Sinead Farrelly’s decision to finally speak out against abuse from her coaches. Don’t miss it.
🙏 Less than 6 months after a cancer diagnosis and 2 months after his final round of chemo, Liam Hendricks pitched for the White Sox yesterday. What an incredible story.
😮 College baseball and softball regionals begin this week and let me tell you…they’re incredible!
🤨 Japan’s Nippon-Ham Fighters allowed their manager to design new uniforms. And…ummm…
🧐 Sports aren’t just about winning. The great Jay Caspian Kang wrote this lovely essay in The New Yorkerabout what it means to lose. Well worth a weekend read.
