Irish WOC hopefuls head for Trondheim

A large group of Irish senior squad members are gathering in Trondheim for this weekends WOC 2010 selection races. The selection races are being held at the Craftcup orienteering event in Norway. They will be competing
alongside some of the biggest names in Scandinavian orienteering who are also using Craftcup for national WOC selection.

Thursday will be spent training nearby, Friday evening is the sprint competition.
Saturday and Sunday see the main events, the Middle distance and Long distance selection races.

Live results can be viewed here: Full reports and photos to follow

Good luck to all the squad out there!

Tá sé críochnaithe!

The third and final stage to the Nordic O tour was held this Saturday in Raufoss, Norway. And with it wraps up the innovative touring concept designed to make orienteering more interesting to spectators. The final race was a chasing start middle distance after the results of the first two stages of the tour in Finland and Sweden. The head of the mens/womens race was apparently very exciting to watch in the arena and the gps tracking and results can be viewed here and here.

The Irish lads were close together starting off but Nick Simonin kept his position as the first Irish to cross the line even with a shakey first few controls. The terrain threw you around physically and the light green areas made it difficult to keep direction and map contact.

This Nordic tour will be run each year up to 2013 and the hope is that they can continuously improve the excitement by learning lessons on previous tours. The lesson this year is that they need to have more tv points on the courses, much more especially with the Stockholm sprints in the old town.

World of o article on the tour found here.
Bjornar Valstad article on the tour concept can be found here.


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The Irish squad was not allowed to enter the O-festivalen relay because international teams cannot run the race. Check out this link for Sondags result of the stafett (relay) and keep an eye out for "Treodóirí na hEireann". And here is a picture of the moving control from the relay event.

Nordic tour - round 2 report

The second stage of the Nordic Orienteering Tour is in progress. The idea of a 'knock-out sprint' is a novel one for orienteering and is aimed at creating head-to-head racing to make for spectator friendly viewing. It takes the format of a 'traditional' sprint qualification race, with one-minute start intervals, where the best 30 athletes go through to a quarter-final. The quarter-finals have 6 athletes starting together in a non-forked, non-butterfly course with the top 2 from each of 5 quarter-finals progressing to the semi-final. 6 athletes from the semi-final go through to the final, both of which are also head-to-head races.

The sprint qualifications were held this morning in Stockholm University. The terrain was a mixture of forest and building complexes, offering fast running and route choices. The standard of qualification was very high and none of the Irish team managed to get into the quarter finals. In the men's race, Nick was the best of the Irish in 58th position, 1 min and 3 sec away from qualifying. In general, the Irish boys had clean races and were happy with their performances. Niamh has been ill since the Venla relay on Saturday and made a last minute decision to run, after a breakfast of paracetamol! She had a steady race and finished in 44th position, 45 seconds down on the qualifying time.

The quarterfinals are in progress at the moment, also at Stockholm University. Unfortunately, there is no GPS tracking, but there will be a live TV broadcast from the semi-finals and finals, to be held in Gamla Stan (the Old Town of Stockholm) this evening (semi-final starts at 5:30pm Irish time, final at 6:30pm Irish time). See the Nordic Tour 'Live' website: (qualification results are here too). The next Irish involvement in the Nordic tour will be in stage 3 in Norway on Saturday.

Thanks to Niamh for the report and hope your feeling better soon

Niamh's Jukola update.

After the first stage of the Nordic Tour, the Irish team took in the Venla and Jukola relays. Running for different teams, between the 5 of us (Nick didn't run) we spent approximately 10 hours in the terrain. It was tough going. After our time in Finland, orienteering and watching Baywatch and Australia's Next Top Model (guess whose choice? clue: one of the boys), we are now en route to Stockholm for the second part of the Nordic Tour. The sprint qualification is on Tuesday morning and with the top 30 advancing to the next round in the men's and women's races, all efforts will be concentrated on making the finals. Qualification starts at 9am Irish time on Tuesday morning, perfect viewing if you've just gotten in to work :-) We'll keep you updated!

Stage 1, Finland
TV program replay
GPS tracking replay

Stage 2, Sweden
Time schedule

Nordic tour - first round

Nicolas reports from Finland on todays action. NORT Stage 1, Tuusula, Finland


Today's race was in two parts, a middle distance for the first two thirds of the overall distance, followed by a map exchange where we changed to a sprint race for the last third of the course. All the men had early start times so we didn't have to spend too long inside a fenced army compound in quarantine, unlike Niamh, but it was a nice afternoon in Finland.


First out was Gerard, followed by Seamus, Dave, Darren and then Nic. The start draw resulted in all the Irish men starting in close proximity to each other. The actual start was not a pleasant experience as we had to wait on the start line for a minute with mosquitos attacking with a tv camera pointed at us. There were cameras at a number of controls on the course, with pictures being shown in the finish arena, and a highlights show this evening on Finnish television, with other countries also likely to air the programme.


The middle distance course had one thing in common for most of the Irish lads (and many other nations), people left the 1st control in the wrong direction to 2! Everyone had GPS tracking so if you have time you can view this mistake as it happened and wonder what were they thinking! It was a long leg to 2, followed by two short legs before another long leg where the route choice was left or right of a big hill. After that we ended up in a very wet marsh before starting a butterfly with two loops. After 18 controls we dropped our Middle Map and picked up a Sprint Map, with different scale and different mapping standards to the middle.


The womens course was very similar to the mens course minus a couple of controls. Niamh was 80% pleased with her race, while David was only 68.2% pleased with his overall race.


This change in scale, from 1:10000 to 1:5000, didn't affect any of the Irish to a major degree. But we were surprised to be running across a supermarket car-park in the middle of the course. There was a possible route choice through an underground car-park but don't think we were allowed to do that (one of the women competitors may have done this though)


Overall the Irish team was pleased with how todays experimental format worked. We now have the Sprint Race experiment to look forward to on Tuesday in Stockholm. Over the weekend the team is heading to the Jukola Relay where we will be running for various teams.

You can watch how the action unfolded on the GPS tracking website.

Nordic tour - first stage start times.

Irish start times for stage 1 of the Nordic Orienteering Tour (all times are Finnish, 2 hours ahead of GMT). All athletes will have live GPS tracking. The model event was held today and spirits are high ahead of the race tomorrow.

Men:
Gerard Butler 16.27
Seamus O'Boyle 16.29
David Healy 16.35
Darren Burke 16.36
Nicolas Simonin 16.48

Women:
Niamh O'Boyle 17.57

See http://nordicorienteeringtour.ikk.no/ for full start lists and TV broadcast times.

Irish team head for the Nordic tour

Six members of the Irish elite squad are heading for Finland this week as the first leg of the 2010 Nordic tour kicks off.

The Nordic tour consists of three World cup events held in Finland, Sweden and Norway throughout June.
The Irish team of Niamh and Seamus O'Boyle, Gerard Butler, Darren Burke, David Healy and Nicolas Simonin start the competition this Thursday 17th June.

You can follow the teams performances on the Nordic tour website.
We also hope to have regular updates from the team members on the Irish blog.

Good luck to all the team!!