Latest ONSW News
Garingal club champion Toby Wilson has been selected to make his Australian debut in Test matches in New Zealand in June.
Toby has been on the fringes of national junior honours in the past 18 months and impressed at the recent Easter carnival in the ACT despite suffering a fractured wrist at State League 1 the weekend prior.
He joins clubmates and junior world championship representatives Michele and Aidan Dawson, and Newcastle's Nicola Blatchford, in the Bushrangers team for the events near Wellington from June 4-6.
Michele and Nicola will be making their senior debuts, while Aidan is in the junior team for the second year in a row
The three Test races will present athletes with complex sand-dune terrain challenges, similar to those in the 2013 NZ World Cup. Many team members have just completed a full week’s tough training in ACT, the second national training camp for the year. This has been good technical and physical preparation for the demands of the NZ races.
A special congratulations also to Victorian mother-son combination Natasha and Aston Key for their selections. Natasha, 44, is a former world championship representative and World Masters gold medallist. She has been in scintillating form this year against much younger opponents in all three formats.
Aston, 15, was named Australian Orienteer of the year for 2015 and is a rising star in the sport. The full story from OA is here.
What price nostalgia? Can you ever truly go back to the scene of a perfect crime? Or relive glory days?
Well, Jock Davis - our NSW junior squad coach - certainly had a good crack as he set some mind-boggling courses for our Long Championships at Snow Hills on Sunday. More than 330 competitors faced long legs and few controls in an area with few features.
Our friends at Orienteering Australia were just last week musing on a famous similar event in 1991 at Inverary.
"Competitors in most of the Red courses picked up their maps at the start at the southern end of the map and discovered that the 1st control was about 2km away on the northern end of the map. In between there were no tracks; instead complex spur/gully terrain where the best route choice was to navigate via the hill tops," recalled one.
"The first leg on M21A was about 2.5km, then there was a very short turning leg, then another 3.5km. Red 3 was about 9km with 7 controls (and three of those were in the last kilometre)," said another.
Jock's demanding courses resulted in some long winning times. The highlights were Duncan Currie (Garingal) beating a quality field in M16A and Michele Dawson (GO) taking out W21A.
On Saturday, NSW junior Rebecca George set the Middle Distance Championships in the eastern part of the same map. They were applauded as testing courses in complex spur/gully terrain with generally low to medium visibility. Father Simon agreed as he won M50A!
NSW runners on the elite podiums were Georgia Jones (UR, 3rd in W20A), Toby Wilson (GO, 3rd in M20A), Michele Dawson (GO, 2nd in W21A) and Nicola Blatchford (NC, 3rd in W21A). Victorians took the juniors and ACT runners the seniors.
Newcastle couple Martina and Stephen Craig made it a double in 35A and son Alvin won M14A, while Tracy Marsh (W40A) and husband Paul (M45A) were also among the gold.
Thanks to Big Foot for a worthy weekend of NSW championships. All the results, splits etc can be accessed via the BF website and our State League page. We ask all participants to please fill out the very brief Course Setter of the Year survey. Some great photos by Tony Hill are now up, too.
Orienteering NSW is pleased to release its annual report for 2015.
At our annual general meeting over Easter in Queanbeyan, all board members were re-elected unopposed.
The annual report can be downloaded here. We thank all our clubs, officials, members and participants for their efforts last year and look forward to another successful year in 2016.
What a way to finish our 25th season of the Sydney Summer Series!
Brett Sewell set a beguiling course that looked generous but quickly got away from you due to all the hills and some of the trickier areas.
The fairy lights in the tunnel at #30 were a nice touch. And to have our presentations in the golf club - attended by close to 100 people - really impressed.
Steve Ryan (Garingal) took out Open Men, and Catherine Murphy (Uringa) Open Women. Karin Hefftner (GO) again won the SSS Cup for most points across the 26 events, Peter Hopper (BN) deserves special praise for visiting all 30 controls each of the 26 weeks in a Ben Hur-like effort.
None of this wonderful daylight savings suburban street-park shenanigans would have been possible without the herculean efforts of series founder and organiser Ross Barr - the Kerry Packer of orienteering - who was rightly feted by Bryony Cox with a black T-shirt bearing an image of his alter ego "Pork Pie".
We say a big thank you to all the course setters, vetters, event organisers, clubs, participants, results gurus Mel Cox and Dave Noble, Graeme Hill for organising the prizes, and Rosscoe for being the legend he is: 70 years young on Wednesday and the post-run prose still flows in a swirling mix of Clive James and Robert Hughes.
Click here for the SSS Cup final tallies.
A big debt of gratitude to Bennelong Northside for a finale in great surroundings on, through and overlooking Lane Cove Country Club. To those who only do SSS, we extend a warm welcome to come and try some of our winter line events, as well as the Moonlight Madness where the score format continues monthly under a full moon.
