It's that time of the year when the seriously big carnivals dominate the European summer - and this week we have the annual World Masters and Junior World Championships underway.
Big Foot's Alastair George is the sole NSW representative at JWOC in Hungary. Competition starts tonight with the longest Long course ever for the junior men - 15km! You can catch all the action via the champs website.
Alastair is off at 5.59pm on Monday. Our new scholar, Grace Molloy from Scotland (who arrives in late September), is also competing.
WMOC in Denmark has already begun, with the Sprint finals run overnight. Ross Barr and Ron Junghans (Garingal), Debbie Davey and daughter Briohny Seaman (Waggaroos), Julia Prudhoe (Central Coast) and Jean Baldwin (Goldseekers) made their respective A finals.
Debbie fared the best, placing 12th in W60A. Courses were set around Copenhagen's inner harbour and seemed far too easy overall, with only a couple of legs featuring difficult route choices. You can catch all the action via the WMOC champs website.
Middle distance qualification is on Tuesday.
One fascinating event in the lead-up was an indoor sprint in a multi-level high school campus (called a Gymnasium - but not a gym as such). The map covered four levels, and controls were found between book shelves, in a toilet, at a piano, in offices and classrooms. Very tricky and exciting orienteering. Here's the map! How do you get from 10 to 11? Look carefully!
GO's Barbara Junghans said: "This event was amazing! The organisers/course planners obviously put a lot of effort into ensuring the desks in the class rooms and the open plan areas matched the arrangement on the map perfectly. Simply by using red-and-white tape they created many devious blockages to potential routes, which really made us think."
Read all about the indoor sprint here and see pics here - do you know of a location we could do this in NSW?
