Definitely an odd wording. However, I have some speculation as to why it is this way.

Maclean's is a Canadian publication and I think many Canadians have a special interest in the UK, and I think the demographics of Maclean's readership likely reinforces this.

Additionally, I would guess that this is some semantic ambiguity introduced via morphological clipping where the author is using European as a shortened form of Continental/Mainland European. It's a fairly common device used to remove excess verbiage especially when reusing the same terms over and over. Pragmatically, when in context being contrasted against Briton, it becomes more clear that the author means Europeans other than Brits.

A similar example could be "all squares have equal sides whereas rectangles do not". It is pragmatically more likely that I mean _non-square_ rectangles even though my wording is ambiguous or straight up incorrect taken at face value.

So I'd guess it's attributable to the psychological primacy of the UK amongst the readership of this publication, semantically confused via a common morphological device, and ultimately disambiguated by the pragmatics of contrasting a part with its whole.

Yeah - I'm a Brit, I read it as a shorthand for continental Europe. Just a shorthand way of differentiating a team of Brits from a team of other Europeans (and Canada).

In British English, "Europe" can mean the mainland. "The continent" means the same thing. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/europe

I've heard this usage in Australia; I can't find a free Australian dictionary so no citation. Australian English maintains more British-isms than American English. I imagine Canadian English may be the same.

I think the point was that there were two separate communities of divers, one largely British and one largely mainland European.

> Britons are Europeans!

It’s pretty common in British English, and so I guess Canadian English as well, to say European and to mean continental Europe. That’s not any kind of political statement, something recent, or anything to do with Brexit, it’s just a shorthand of speech.

Id say it comes down to the way cave diving in Briton is largely different from that of mainland Europe. So even on site the British cave divers would see the approach as different to the Europeans

In Briton cave diving is largely done to move between flooded sections of dry cave, so most cave divers are dry cavers first, and diving is just used to bypass sumps.

Also most British cave diving is done solo (so without a buddy that most systems recommend.) in quite tight conditions.

Caves in mainland Europe tend to be larger and the diving philosophy is different. There you will find team diving prevalent.

The distinction between UK/EU was obviously made among the teams themselves.

There happened to be a UK crew, and then another crew of Europeans, so 'team UK' 'team Europe' makes sense. If they were event eating/living apart, then the distinction was made on the ground, not by the author.

If there were a bunch of Swedes (Thailand is a disproportionately popular destination for Swedes) it might have been 'Team Sweden' / 'Team Europe' as well.

"I wonder why Europeans were so well represented."

Because Europe is considerably more advanced in many ways than a place like Thailand - and also bigger and richer. The 'talent pool' for these things is going to be massively larger'.

To compare: Thailand is 70M people with 7K GPD per capita. It's kind of poor, not 'technically developed' is my nice way of saying they don't have all of the civic, academic, social, industrial foundations that other, richer countries do. And so a lot people in villages do not create the surpluses that say, a European IT consultant has to adventure in their spare time. I think also, that 'different sports for different cultures' - it might just be that 'caving is not a thing' in Thailand or he region.

Wanting to leave the EU is one thing but relocating the entire archipelago to a different continental plate would be a tall order indeed.

But Brexit does mean Brexit... /s

They can't stop being European - because Britain is in Europe.

It's a bit like saying Japan doesn't want to be Asian.

Try being a white New Zealander. You technically don't class as European but sort of get described as being of European descent and then on a technicality you are from an island in the Pacific Ocean so you could claim you are a Pacific Islander only that's not what a Pacific Islander is as they are all brown and from Fiji, Samoa, Tonga etc.

So I dunno... sometimes categorization is complicated.

We just refer to the lot of us as Kiwis after the small and the flightless native bird. What the hell does that have to do with anything I don't know.

Europe =/= the European Union.

A few years ago 1 in 4 Brits votes to leave the European Union for a variety of reasons. That view has now changed.