Fame at Last

Wow, guess who made the front cover of CompassSport this month. I think Nick got a little carried away, since I'm on page 2 and page 16 as well. The photo was taken at the final control at the HH Burnham Beeches event in March.

The JK has come and gone, and was a fantastic four days. The Assembly Areas are now dominated by club banners, and nearly every club now has one. This adds a lot of colour and atmosphere, and made it feel like each day was something special. As I write this Helen is at a JK2008 progress meeting where they will be trying to work out how we can do even better next year. Four more days of warm sunshine would be a good start.

And finally the CHIG event last Sunday that was noticeable for two things. Firstly it used master maps, a concept I thought had died out. This was the first time I have had to copy down my course for over 18 months, and I had forgotten how annoying it was. Second, and more important, we had a new family double. I won the brown and James won the white. The target now is for three family victories at an event if Helen can get her act together!

WOC-7: Bushmen in a Norwegian Wood

By the time of WOC 97 in Grimstad in the south of Norway we knew that Great Britain would be staging the next World Championships. That meant a large GB team of officials going out to watch what happened behind the scenes, see what to do and what not to do, and push out as much publicity as possible. Helen and I were part of that team, and spent a hectic week spectating, competing and having all sorts of meetings.

This was another of those "high expectations, good results but not quite what we'd hoped". World Championships. The problem was actually worse than that. Four medals at the previous two World Championships meant that the British spectators expected a medal. No matter what the real expectations should have been, the number of medals was always going to be the test of how well we'd done at all World Championships to come. Yvette had injury problems beforehand, and was never quite up with the pace. Steve Hale was the other great hope, but he too wasn't quite up with the leaders. I seem to remember that this was a "peaked too late" problem and that just after WOC he won the Swedish Championships instead.

From the spectating viewpoint this was a pretty reasonable WOC. The weather was sunny all week, and the areas were generally runnable and not too hilly so the spectator races were enjoyable. The opening ceremony was memorable in the sense that it went on for ever and seemed to have little to do with orienteering. The commentary at each event included live feeds from the forest where a whispering commentator provided information on who was going through a particular control site. This was a bit strange at first, but ended up being quite entertaining. But it was the WOC song that really sticks in the memory. Instantly referred to as "Bushmen", since the chorus started with the line "We are bushmen", this was one of those annoying tunes that you end up humming all the way around a course and stops you concentrating properly. It was played at every opportunity at each event, and really deserves greater exposure to a world-wide audience. I greatly regret not buying the CD that was available at the time.

Whilst I was looking around for some background information it struck me that a lot of the events from the early days of the internet have effectively disappeared. Blair Trewin's site was great for events up to 1993, but he then settles for links to event sites that no longer exist. I can't find a full set of WOC 95 or WOC 97 results anywhere, and I think I'm about to discover that WOC 99 is the same. The IOF site appears to have everything from WOC 2001 onwards.

But anyway, the story has now come full circle and the spectator's tale has reached a World Orienteering Championships in Great Britain. There was only one question that anybody was really interested in: could Yvette win a gold medal at last?