PreO Day 2

We're home now, catching up on all the things we put off while we were in Croatia, one of which was posting about the final competitions. Day 2 of the PreO was not as difficult as Day 1. Partly just because of the high visibility of Golf Course terrain, but also because the weather cooperated this time. The course consisted of 26 problems requiring subtle contour reading, feature identification, distance estimation, and just figuring where best to sight from.

This was also the team competition day. For team competition, each country gets to enter a team of three, which must include one paralympic competitor. We haven't competed in the team category for a few years because we haven't had a paralympic member for a while. This year we had David Irving and the question was who else should make up our team? Clare had the highest, most consistent results thus far, so she seemed like an obvious pick. Mika had the next best results, but was also a newer team member with less experience. Sharon had a lot of past experience under her belt. In the end, Sharon deferred to Mika, since his results had been better. This turned out to be a fortuitous call.

Clare had an excellent day, missing only one of the controls. Despite that, she only placed 16th. Many competitors did well and Clare had already missed two timed controls on Day 1, so she was very careful to be correct today, even at the expense of being slow. Mika and David also had good results and we all aced the timed control for the team event. The result was a placing of 13th out of 20 teams, just behind Great Britain. In terms of percentile ranking and percentage of controls correct compared with the winning team, this was our best showing in all of the years that the team competition has had it's current format.

Overall, a successful WTOC for Team USA. While we did not achieve any new top ranking compared with past performances, we did manage to show improvement in TempO and Team competition and had some individual performances to be proud of. I know there is motivation to work to be even better next year.

Most Missed Control of the Day - #5

Number 5 was a Z answer that caught about 40% of the competitors. The viewing point was across the lake and the control description was reentrant. You could clearly see the four controls and try to line them up with various trees to determine which might be correct. What doesn't show on this solutions map is the streamered pathway that competitors had to stay on. This was a N/S path on the flat area between number 3 and 6. It allowed travel to the south toward the end of the lake. From there it was clear that the line of controls wasn't anywhere near the center line of the reentrant or the control circle.



Here is a link to a nice video of photos from the WTOC. These photos are by Joaquim Margarido, who runs the Portuguese Orienteering Blog.

I intend to keep this blog running through the year. I'll be adding posts every Thursday, starting with some more recaps and review of this year's WTOC and then covering training and competition issues of interest nationally. See you next week!