European Champs underway: Middle qualification

The 2012 European Championships started this morning with middle qualification races at Hökberg, near Mora in Sweden. Ireland were represented by Rosalind Hussey, Niamh O'Boyle, Nick Simonin and Hugh Cashell, all running in their first European Champs.

The top 17 qualified for Thursday's A final. All of the favourites in the men and women are safely through, with the Scandanavians dominating. Heat winners were Minna Kauppi, Anne Margarete Hausken, Helena Jansson, Valetin Novikov, Olav Lundanes and Johan Runesson. In the women's A heat, Niamh finished 25th but was pleased with a technically solid run. Roz was running in the C heat and was happy enough with her performance. Both Niamh and Roz had GPS tracking today and it is available on the EOC homepage.  In men's heat A, Nick had some costly errors that took him out of the qualification positions, and Hugh (heat B) was happy but felt he was too slow.

Tomorrow Hugh Cashell will be Ireland's sole representative in the long distance qualification (GPS tracking online - first start in the men is at 10:30 Irish time). Niamh, Roz and Nick will be joined by David Healy for the sprint qualification on Wednesday morning.

Our thoughts are with Gerard Butler, selected for the Irish team for these championships, his father Michael and family at this time.

All maps and results are posted at the European Championships homepage: www.eoc2012.se
Photos: Niamh and Ros on their way to the finish at Hökberg

New Irish squad blogs launched

2012 will see a few changes for the Irish senior squad blog, we are leaving Blogger behind and moving to a new site at wordpress. The new senior squad blog shall have a larger spread of information available for squad members. As well as being the place to catch all the latest squad news you will be able to access more info about squad training and competitions, funding, selection and various other helpful stuff!

You can view the new blog here: Irish senior squad blog

The new Irish WOC2012 Switzerland blog has also just been launched and you can view it here: Irish WOC2012 blog

If you feel like trawling through the archives of this the old squad blog you will find a link to it on the new blog!

WOC2012 training dates announced

The organisers of WOC 2012 have decided to change the dates of the June WOC training camp. This training will now take place after the World cup in St-Gallen, Switzerland from the 25th to 30th June. More details will follow on the WOC2012 websiteand keep an eye out for the Irish WOC2012 blog coming soon!