LONDON, July 5-6, 2023 – Lucy Reid, the fastest female in the entire 2022 J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge Series, is at it again.

Reid, employed by Corporate Challenge owner and operator J.P. Morgan, is now also atop the female leaderboard in the 2023 Series, after clocking a sensational time of 18:08 in the second night of racing at the 35^th J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge London in Battersea Park.

Reid’s 18:08 was significantly faster than the Series-best 18:39 she authored in 2022. It is also nearly a minute faster than the second-best female time in the 2023 Series, the 19:03 posted by Amelie Svensson, representing the Association of German Railway Workers, in Frankfurt on June 14.

“I felt like I really paced my race well,” Reid understated. “It felt good.”

Reid’s mile pace over Battersea’s 3.5-mile (5.6km) cross country-styled race course was 5:11 and so dominant that she would have finished among the 15 fastest males over the two nights of racing.

Annie Birch, running for law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, won the female race in the first night at Battersea with an impressive time of 20:07. Sam Gebreselassie of global strategy firm L.E.K. Consulting (17:03) and Daniel Mulryan from law practice Gill Jennings & Every (17:14) were the male champions on Wednesday and Thursday respectively.

Reid, Birch, Gebreselassie and Mulryan were in front of the pack of a near-record field of entrants. The two nights in pleasant summer conditions at Battersea attracted a total of 26,530 entrants from 736 companies. That represented an impressive 35% increase in the total number of Corporate Challenge entries and a 19% increase in the number of participating companies from London 2022 (19,672 entrants from 619 companies).

Record attendance at the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge London was set in 2019, with 30,648 entries. The event has shown remarkable resilience, recovering 87% of its participation in just two years following the 2020-21 event cancellations due to COVID-19.

The fantastic 2023 crowd was fueled by these largest company teams: Goldman Sachs (499 entries), HSBC (463), Morgan Stanley (458), BNP Paribas (400), PwC (399), UBS (399), London Stock Exchange (295), Macquarie Group (277), Societe Generale (250), and Schroders Investment (250).

All the companies over the two nights of competition and fun contributed mightily to the community also. The JPMorgan Chase Foundation donated in celebration of the Corporate Challenge to Centrepoint, the UK’s leading youth homelessness charity. Centrepoint provides homeless young people with accommodation, support and life skills to help them grow beyond what has happened to them in the past and help them to realize their potential.

The Corporate Challenge has carved out a meaningful place in London’s sporting calendar, and as such regularly attracts highly visible English athletes who attend to cheer on the same people who packed stands for them. This year legendary cricketers Eoin Morgan and Jofra Archer were in attendance.

Among the companies Morgan and Archer applauded was StoneX, an institutional-grade financial services network that connects world-leading companies, organizations, and investors to global markets. StoneX was happily at Battersea Park and also supports the Corporate Challenge globally. In 2023 alone it will ultimately field teams at races in London, New York, Chicago, Sydney, Frankfurt, Singapore and Buenos Aires.

“The motivation is to offer an opportunity for all employees to take part in a sport/ activity after work, socialize with colleagues and clients, and for our employees to carry on after the night doing exercise,” said Marcio Silveira, team captain for StoneX’s London squad.

Silveira also was with the StoneX team at the Corporate Challenge London in 2022 and was thrilled to see the company nearly double its participation in 2023. He feels the time is right for collegial events like the Corporate Challenge.

“I think now most companies are encouraging their staff to join such events and I believe people now feel the necessity of join events to have the interaction with colleagues, friends and meet new people,” Silveira concluded.

And with growing momentum in tow, that is nine of 15 events in the books for the 47^th year of the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge Series. It will now take a two-month break before resuming events on September 7 in San Francisco, beginning a run-in to the season close that includes six races in four different countries. The Series has attracted 168,115 entrants (18,679 average attendance) compared to 96,705 (10,745) from the same nine events in 2022. That’s a sensational 74% rise, proving that COVID was just a temporary road block in the Corporate Challenge’s long story of success.