Running for Life !
Fourteen Oracle France employees are gearing up to spend four days and four nights in a 750 km relay race for a very important cause.
It will be the fifth year in which Oracle is fully engaged in the Course du Coeur (Heart Race), the annual event aimed at raising organ donation awareness. More than 8,000 people in France currently need a transplant. Of these, 200 each year will die waiting, as there are not enough organs available.
The good news is that 4,500 people per year do receive an organ transplant and continue their lives as before.
“Giving an organ is giving life,” says Professor Christian Cabrol, the surgeon who performed France’s first heart transplant in 1968 and sponsor of the event.
Hearts are needed, and so are kidneys, lungs and livers. Steve Jobs was saved by a liver transplant last year.
The Course du Coeur is an impressive operation supported by the Minister of Health and highly visible nationwide. This year it takes place from March 17-21, covering the 750 km between Paris and Les Arcs 1600, a ski report in the French Alps.
Other companies competing included HP, SAP, Renault, EDF-GDF, Socotec, Baxter, RTE, and Dassault. One team is composed exclusively of runners who themselves have had organ transplants.
As the runners traverse France they spread the organ donation message through nationwide press and TV coverage and via the people encountered as they race through more than 200 villages along the way.
At the same time, in an operation known as 10,000 Hearts for the Hospital, children create hearts out of paper, tissue or cardboard and will give them to runners as they pass through the villages. These hearts are given to the runners, who pass them to organizers who distribute them in hospitals where children themselves lie in wait of an organ transplant.
With just over 5 weeks before the starting gun, this team has been training now for many months, running several 10km trail stretches in preparation. The team has also participated in the Heart Race Communications Challenge, which recognizes teams that most effectively spread the organ donation message.
And on February 11 Oracle France offers a free concert at which the band Mama Shoots the Dog will perform a song written for the team: The Day After.
Infinite Red Potential News will be bringing you updates before and during the event. Find out more in the English language prepared by the team or, for French speakers, you can visit the Team’s blog:
(Oracle France team 2010 below)
LeadershipInSociety, Oracle France
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