The Orienteering Foundation is a charity that promotes and supports orienteering, to bring all the benefits this amazing sport has to offer the people of the UK.
Examples of how they have supported the growth and development of orienteering include: part-funding several clubs for Club Development Officer roles, providing coaching course grants, and supporting athletes in attending international orienteering competitions.
Development Squad athlete and member of Interlopers Orienteering Club, Mairi Eades, is currently conducting a survey to investigate the current impact and effectiveness the Foundation has across the orienteering community.
We invite you to complete this short questionnaire to help her with her research.
A link to the survey is available here.
We are able to announce the full panels of selectors for 2024. These panels choose the athletes to represent Great Britain at international races.
We are delighted to have been able to attract two well-known and established former WOC and JWOC athletes. Jenny Johnson will sit on the junior selection panel, and Jenny Peel on the senior panel. Both are members of SYO and are active in the development, coaching and support to squads throughout the Performance Programme locally, nationally, and internationally.
Ranald Macdonald has agreed to extend his role as independent scrutineer; a job that sense checks, and if needed challenges, process and fairness-to the senior selections, as well as continuing in this role for the juniors.
Pippa Archer will take her place on both junior and senior panels following her recent appointment as Performance Manager.
We recognise the commitment that these volunteers give back to our sport, and thank them for agreeing to take on these complex and important roles.
How the selector panels work is detailed in the selection policy here.
For completeness, the full panels are for 2024 are:
Seniors
Juniors
Following this weekend's British Orienteering Championships 2024, we spoke to Weekend Coordinator Duncan Archer (Lakeland Orienteering Club) to learn more about the planning process for this year's event and his highlights from the weekend.
Major events like the JK and British Champs rotate round the regions and home nations. NEOA has always been happy to do its bit staging these events about once every 10 years for each of JK and British. We last did the British Long and Relay in 2014, so exactly 10 years later here we are again!
The areas in the North East that are able to accommodate major events are either around the North York Moors (CLOK areas), or in Northumberland (NATO and NN areas), and major events we host tend to alternate between the two. We were originally staging JK 2020 near Whitby, which sadly got cancelled along with many other events due to Covid, and so it was natural to return to similar plans for BOC/BRC in 2024. I was also coordinator for the ill-fated JK 2020, so I decided to take on the role again and hopefully see it through this time (despite the fact we moved to the Lakes in May last year, but most of the coordinator’s role can be done remotely).
Mulgrave Woods was a very early candidate for JK2020 but unavailable due to access. However it became available in 2024 and is excellent for a long distance race with areas of technical detail plus options for longer route choice legs. Hutton Mulgrave and Skelder, which we were also going to use for JK 2020 relays, has a good variety of terrain, with the very best bits of natural woodland offering good running and orienteering challenge, right next to fields for arena and parking – ideal for a relay. We bused competitors on the four longest courses to a remote start in the relay area before a run through to Mulgrave to get the length without too much repetition – a similar concept that was used when the JK was here in 1996. An added bonus was both forests and the long parking were owned by a single landowner which makes life easier.
The biggest challenge was rain and wet underfoot conditions. Through winter this was expected, but it persisted through to the event (where in previous years things have been “fine” by mid-April). It affected many things. Some junior relays needed last minute replanning around forestry work that had more impact on muddy rides than you’d expect. The conditions on the long courses were muddy and heavy going (as well as the hills!). But most notably the parking fields and arenas were very squelchy on both days. More tracking was ordered for long parking the week before the event, and we strongly encouraged car sharing (we also considered busing from remote parking but decided against it). We were hugely indebted to the assistance from Mulgrave Estates for laying tracking, firming up entrances, moving equipment, and being on hand with a tractor and ATV on day 1. Also to Austen Floyd one of the Cleveland Mountain Rescue team members (who were providing first aid cover) who happened to also have a tow truck and kindly offered his services on relay day.
Other challenges? When you are an official at a major event you understand how much goes on behind the scenes, much of which is never apparent to competitors (although some of it sadly is). Just some examples included:
It was a challenge! To put things in perspective – we had 100 volunteers at the long, and 70 at the relay. NEOA has 160 ranked members (a reasonable measure of active orienteers). Do the sums – even if all those orienteers in the North East were to help on one day we still wouldn’t have enough. Compare that with other regions – aside from Wales and Northern Ireland (even fewer orienteers than NEOA!), all other regions have at least 300 ranked members, and the biggest – SWOA, SEOA, NWOA and SOA – have over 600 each.
How did we manage? We pulled together! People helped both days. Some people, particularly team leaders, sacrificed runs (although many volunteers did also run). We had representatives in each of the three open NEOA clubs to drum up support, and our volunteer manager took requirements from organisers, and filled in positions. We also asked participants from outside the region on the entry form if they could help and got over 50 offers which was fantastic (so much so that we ended up not needing them all!).
At the end of the day, most volunteers don’t actually do it for any particular reward or recognition (although we did give helper vouchers to spend at traders at the event), and it is great to see such a spirit of volunteering in the sport. Most people are just happy to do their bit, to balance the countless times they benefit from it.
Standing in a waterlogged part of the long parking field as tracking was going down on Friday I could not understand how this was going to work. And on the Friday night it felt like the calm before the storm. The hard work had been done. No doubt many officials and team leaders were mentally going through their task lists for the next day, but as coordinator there wasn’t a whole lot I could do. So much so that I drafted half of this interview that evening! But I was still very stressed about parking and arena conditions.
Saturday I arrived at 7am. We managed to get traders into creative positions. The parking situation was “managed” through the morning. Competitors started to arrive in the arena, set up tents, have their runs, and everything proceeded as it should! The courses turned out to be challenging and tough – as I believe it should be for the British Championships – and people were coming back exhausted but the vast majority still happy. They were three technical complaints but we handled them according to the process, the results stood, and we got all the prizes presented with the help of special guest Steve Cram.
Sunday it again quickly became evident parking was going to be challenging. Now as coordinator, in theory by the day of the event you should have done your “coordinating”, and the other officials and team leaders should just make it happen. In reality issues come up, and I saw it as my role to just jump in where needed. In the end this involved helping direct the parking as I knew that without getting all the competitors and their cars into the field there would be no meaningful event. We did it, we overcame some challenges mentioned earlier, and the mass starts got under way. Reports from their forest were positive, and careful navigation in the heat of the head to head relay paid off, and the winners were duly crowned.
Orienteering is hugely technical sport with lots of detail to organise. But two things will make or break an event. Firstly what goes on in the forest – plan good courses, get the maps correct, and get the controls in the right place. Secondly the logistics, parking and arenas – assume it will rain, and then rain some more, budget for lots of tracking, and have contingency plans (tow trucks, buying more tracking, etc.). There is much more besides but it will follow and if it doesn’t it isn’t the end of the world.
It is important is to fill your organiser, planner and team leader roles early with your best people, make sure they and their teams are briefed, and then let them do their job. My role as coordinator was to help find some of those people in the first place (I’m hugely grateful to the great team we had), join the dots between them, make sure people remained informed about what else was going on beyond their immediate role, act as the bridge to British Orienteering, and help make judgements on a whole host of questions where the way forward wasn’t obvious. I also covered some things that spanned both days (procuring various services and systems, website, medals, traders, bibs, juries, event programme etc. – several of which could have been done by others, although see previous point about number of volunteers!).
By Bob Haskins, Leicestershire Orienteering Club (LEI)
Saturday 14 September 2019 turned out to be a warm and sunny early Autumn day. It couldn’t have been better for holding the British Sprint Championships at Loughborough University.
There were 800 entrants who were able to enjoy a day of fast, and at times complex, sprint orienteering. The Event Centre was at one of the University’s main facilities buildings, thanks to holding the event out of term time, and had plenty of capacity for enquiries, starts and results displays, and download. Loughborough University is the premier sporting campus in the UK, and the University authorities were very accommodating, as they had been when the event was held here previously in 2013. It is also the largest single campus site in the country and we still have about one third of the campus which has not been used for a Championship event. It is also a quickly changing environment, and our mapper, Peter Hornsby was making changes up until just a few days prior to the event.
As the available area is so large, it enables the heats and finals to be on adjoining areas, but with no overlap. This makes life more difficult for the
Planner, Iain Phillips, of course, who effectively plans two separate large events for use on one day with 40+ separate courses and 150+ control sites. However, this makes for a much more interesting event for the competitors, with the most complex areas being used for the Finals.
From an organisational point of view, having good facilities makes putting on the event a bit less challenging. There is a 630-space multi-storey car park available, so no muddy fields for us. The arena area seemed to work well and it was possible to look down over the finish run-in from the grass banks or the hard standing next to the event centre.
The biggest challenge of the Sprints is the timetable for the day. We started all the morning heats over one hour, setting off 20 competitors at a time in full minutes. This was thanks to our 18-member start team and some pre-event practices and much thinking. The big pressure then comes to process the heats into the start lists for the Finals, and we were very thankful that this was contracted out by us to SIEntries. The printout I have of the finals start lists shows a time of 12:38 pm, ready for the first finals starts at 1:30 pm. The Finals were over a larger window, and therefore a bit more relaxed.
The Open class Final was also a World Ranking Event which necessitated a variation from normal practice, in that all the three finals were the same course. Only an A Finalist could be British Champion, but any of the finalists could win the WE race. As it turned out it was the British Champions who won this race as well. For the first time at the British Sprints, there were also separate class medals for M/W 18 and 20. We also altered the usual ordering of the Finals, so that we had a stream of A Final winners coming in at regular intervals, culminating in the Open Class finalists at the end of the afternoon with most competitors back and watching this exciting finale and listening to the excellent commentary.
Kris Jones started strongly in the morning sprint qualifying race, winning his heat by over a minute. He followed this up with a superb run in the afternoon final, winning in 12.27 over 3km, 47 seconds clear of Peter Hodkinson in 2nd place and Jonny Crickmore in 3rd.
Megan Carter-Davies also won both her heat and final, finishing the final in 11.44 for 2.3km, ahead of Alice Leake (2nd) and Cecile Andersen (3rd).
Photo credits: Bob Haskins (LEI)
Full results are available here.
Congratulations go to all the British champions!
British Orienteering would like to thank Bob Haskins (LEI) and all members from the organising clubs for an excellent day of Sprint racing.