Debbie grabs gold as Big Foot take five titles

Big Foot women led the way with five titles at the Australian Sprint championships in Ballarat. Debbie Byers took her first ever title in W60A whilst at the lowest end of the age classes, Nea Shingler won the corresponding 10A title with Oliver Freeman winning the boys. Greg "goldfinger" Barbour maintained his unbeaten carnival, whilst Tracy Marsh stepped down to W35A to win.

The small area made for congested competition, with  a few head-on collisions, map exchanges and a lot of red-and-white tape.

Not much gold mined at Aus Middle Champs

Skatey Creek map

After a fairly steep introduction to gold mine terrain at the Vic Middle distance champs, things got much hairier at the Aus champs, and many of the large Big Foot contingent struggled with the dense detail.

Highlight was a clear win to Greg Barbour - he tied with Queenslander Mark Nemeth at yesterday's Vic Champs and was behind Mark for much of today's event before finally catching him over the last set of short legs in the mining.

Metro League Final - Results hub

Thanks to everyone who braved the rain today, particularly the Big Foot crew who were out early and late. A trail of sickness and travel laid waste to the organising team, so special thanks to those who crawled out of their sick bed to make today happen, and to he who crawled into his bed to miss the whole thing.

Eventor | WinSplits | AttackPoint | RouteGadget | Big Foot | Twitter Feed

 

NSW Ski-O Championships 2015 - Perisher

External: WinSplits | Eventor | RouteGadget

 

Third time in three years for the NSW Ski Orienteering Championship up in the Snowy Mountains in Australia and what seemed to be a given success with plenty of snow and all time high in registration, turned into something else when the weather gods turned a blind eye at the event.

It started already on Saturday when my plans was to check the tracks and surroundings and the winds swept the valley with speed up to 90-100 km/h (25m/s) and I hardly could open the front door to the ski lodge. With big eyes I saw a guy swooshing past on his skis (surely exceeding the speed limit) with no poles. He clearly hadn't consider how to get back. Not only was it windy but it rained heavily too. In the afternoon the stands and the flags had to go out and I was the one. I can say, it was a very long time since I had frozen that much. Anyway with everything set for the race it was just to hope that the weather would be better. It was ... slightly.

With 2 degrees and mixed rain/snow, the sunshine skiers from Canberra decided to stay at home. The rest of the competitors who started, either gave up or really really got great value for their hard earned bucks. Winning time and length (as the crow flies) on the short course was 53 min (2,5km), middle 1:29 hrs (3,5km) and long 2:05 hrs (5,5km). To try to describe the weather and tracks would not be easy therefore I let the pictures speak for themself ... although I don't think they make a fair representation of how bad it actually was.

At the finish it was mere happy faces of the competitors even with water pouring out of their clothes and with chattering teeth. A happy couple had been out for 3:10 hrs and I asked the guy, given he was soaked, if he didn't thought about giving up. The reply was - "my missus wouldn't allow me". .... smile emoticon

Big thanks to Wayne Pethybridge from http://www.perisherxcountry.org/ who did a tremendous work on the ski-doo, David Poland for the promotion in ACT and Jason R and Michael R (with son) for the event support and to http://bigfootorienteers.com/
Btw. it seems I totally forgotten the pain of clearing the snow of a car!!!

— with Jason Rutkowski at Perisher Valley.

Excellent NY Times video introducing orienteering & TG

Jukkola Start - Great footage from helicopter cam

QB3 Day 2 Results

Links to the results, Eventor, splits, ranking all available now from qb3 web site

World's best O area to be used in 2016 NSW school holidays

Great news for fans of really, really good orienteering. The French are putting on O'France in 2016 during the NSW July school holidays on the fantastic Larzac plateau.

This is what Thierry Georgiuou had to say about one of the areas "Les Bouzigasses" when arguing for its inclusion on 101 maps to orienteer on before you die:"This terrain has to be in the list, simply because if it is not in the list, no other terrain can enter in the “101 Orienteering maps you should run on before you die”

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