We had registered our team for the first Open European Championship and were staying at a hotel in Nice.
The start was hilarious... that is, for our team, with the exception of one player. The reason is, that he suffers from a fear of mountains and heights. He had figured out that he could travel by train from Nice, via Monte Carlo to Menton. No problem. He intended to leave for Menton early on the first day of the tournament. We planned to leave a little later by car.
Some time after he had left, he called us. He was panicking: he was stranded in Monte Carlo, the train tunnel had partly collapsed, blocking all train traffic between Monte Carlo and Menton! He had already started to get drunk. Only if he was drunk was he going to be able to endure the drive through the mountains...

On arriving in Monte Carlo, we saw our unlucky train traveller had been making good progress. He greeted us with a dazed look in his eyes and then emptied a huge glass of beer. On the table we saw similar glasses lined up, quite a few of them and all empty.
'Trainzoff', he mumbled. He couldn't bear to get in the car at this stage and ordered some more anti-fear fluid.
Later Bas, my partner, and I sat him in between us on the back seat and started testing his knowledge of the bidding system intensively, in order to distract him from our skimming along valleys and ravines. He tried desperately to concentrate on us and our questions, but soon he was sweating profusely.

When we finally arrived at the Menton venue, we were late, due to the unplanned and unavoidably long lasting stop in Monte Carlo. We rushed from the entry desk into the gaming room. We were panting when we sat down to play against a visibly irritated Canadian team.
It turned out to be a quite strong team, but as a result of the annoyance about our late arrival things went wrong for the Canadians. To make things worse, the French South coast was stricken by a heat wave and the venue lacked air conditioning. (The team of multiple world champions Meckstroth−Rodwell was not troubled. 'Meckwell' had been hired for a fortune by a rich, playing sponsor. Small movable airco's were placed at their tables; not all men are equal... Normally one hopes to avoid meeting a strong team like that at the beginning of a tournament, but soon everybody was only too happy to play them.)
So apart from being irritated by our late arrival, our opponents simply suffered from the heat as well.
Then the following suit combination turned up. As South I declared 4♥. I had drawn the trumps and had surrendered the lead in spades I think. East, my right hand opponent, switched to the ♦6. This is the diamond suit as I saw it:

		♦	K 5 4
		♦	Q 10 2

On East's ♦6 I played the ♦10 from my hand, which won the trick. I continued with the ♦2 and when West played another small diamond, I went up with dummy's ♦K, which held. Next I played the ♦5 from dummy, East the ♦J and on my ♦Q West again contributed a small diamond. Three diamond tricks!!
I stuck my head through the gap in the table screen and said: 'Something is going wrong here. I don't have the ace of diamonds. Does everybody have thirteen cards?'
There was silence was for a while: the opponents feverishly checked their hands. Then I heard East cursing. The ♦A had been stuck behind another card and only now had shown up. Our opponents' mood, not the best already earlier on, now really reached a new low (by way of this unique proceedings in diamonds I made 4♥, in which I certainly would have been defeated otherwise).
In the end we won the match 18−12 but that was corrected to 15−12, since we were penalised 3 VP for being late. We were very satisfied however, since this was not a bad result at all, given the fact that one of our team's players was drunk as a skunk. We filled him up with coffee and, taking his condition into account, he played surprisingly well during the rest of the day.
And I had handled a suit combination in a way I was never going to forget.