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Superb weather, a course extension and a record 499 entries made for a memorable Great NOSH Footrace on Sunday.
This was the 45th running of the famous 16km trail run from Lindfield Oval to Seaforth Oval through stunning Middle Harbour scenery - and a 6km extension to allow an additional 22km course drew in some serious competition.
The forecast rain was nowhere to be seen, and temps nudging 20C made for thirsty work as the runners finished under blue skies.
Rhys Howard and Lindsay Norton were the inaugural 22km winners, while WHO's Tasmanian recruit Karl Bicevskis took out the 16km race along with Jo Nevin.
In the walking category, Big Foot's Andrew Wisniewski and Joyce Subloo were first across the line.
All up, nine orienteers recorded top-3 placings. Results can be found here.
A big thank you to Bennelong Northside Orienteers and Bold Horizons for organising the event, Seaforth Football Club for use of their grounds, National Parks for course permission, and all the helpers who made the day such a success.
Did you know that you can make a tax-deductible donation to orienteering?
The end of the financial year is rapidly approaching and Orienteering Australia is continuing its fundraising partnership with the Australian Sports Foundation.
Typically, this is the time of year when many community donors and philanthropists donate to the sports they support.
Donate by June 30 and you can claim it as part of your 2018-19 tax return.
There are a range of fundraising projects available for you to choose from that will support Australia’s elite orienteers and OA itself. Many of these projects aim to help offset the high cost of our senior and junior elites representing Australia overseas. Information on the various projects can be found here.
There are 6 OA projects currently available:
OA WOC Team Support
OA JWOC Team Support
OA High Performance Support
OA MTBO International Competition Support
Southern Arrows WOC/JWOC Representatives Support
Administration Support
West Australian elite MTBO rep Ricky Thackray is also seeking support with his overseas travel expenses and will again be representing Australia in the 2019 MTBO WOC in Denmark in July/August. Ricky’s project can be found here.
On the topic of fundraising, if any orienteer is interested in helping with OA’s fundraising by developing, managing and promoting OA’s fundraising ASF projects and working with the athletes to develop their own fundraising, please contact Paul Prudhoe (
Bennelong and WHO delivered stunning wins in Division 1 as MetrO League kicked off with a massive 212 participants - more than anyone can remember in 25 years of the competition.
The tranquility of the northern section of Manly Dam was broken only by the 'ting' of baseball bats warming up at Aquatic Reserve.
ML co-ordinator Ian Jessup noted about 20 debutants across the five grades - including two West Australian NOL runners and a couple of primary school students. How good are our kids?!
Manly Dam is an area with a renowned thickness of vegetation but enough tracks and cliffs to allow shortcuts for the daring.
Multiple champions Big Foot came unstuck with two Division 1 runners mispunching in their shock 31-21 loss to newly promoted hosts Bennelong Northside, while WHO roped in two spare Uringa runners to down Garingal 29-26.
Winning times were pretty close to the expected, except in Division 5 where 22 people went under time, while in Division 2 the all-Garingal match featured seven runners within two minutes of each other.
A big thanks to setter Peter Thomason, controller Rod Parkin, organiser Brett Sewell and the Bennelong Northside club.
Results, whiteboard scores and splits are linked on our ML web page.
Next round is June 23 at Nurragingy Reserve.
The Sydney MetrO League starts up this Sunday at Manly Dam with a record 32 teams from nine clubs competing across five divisions.
This will be the 25th anniversary (by location too) of the very first ML event, the brainchild of the late competition founder Frank Assenza.
We have 4 teams in Division 1 and 7 teams in each of Divisions 2-5. Some teams will run two matches each round as result.
Entries are now open on Eventor and club members are asked to pre-enter. There will be Enter on Day in all five ML divisions as well as Very Easy and Easy.
MetrO League is a great step between street/park orienteering and bush orienteering. Contact your club captain to arrange to be in a team.
Matches are run between competing teams of five. The fastest runner in a match gets 10 points and the slowest gets one point. Add up your team's points to determine the winner of each match.
All the 2019 MetrO League information can be found on the ML web page.
