A team of multisport athletes won NZ's biggest mountain-bike orienteering event, the 2-day Cyclic Saga, held near Christchurch last weekend. Hayden Key, Mark Williams and John Knight led at the overnight campsite with 350 points, ahead of last year's winners Charlie Palmer and Julian Mitchell on 321. Palmer (who just a week ago won the one-off double-circuit of the Karapoti Classic MTB race) and Mitchell top-scored day 2 with 320, but the multisporters' 300 was enough to keep them ahead. In the end the difference between them was a 9-point lateness penalty!
Dave Mitchell and Joe Arts won the vets section with 580, the top mixed team of Lisa Savage and Ian Goldschmidt scored 570, while Ginny Bush, Lynn Weedon and Mary Jowett won the womens category with 500.
The Cyclic Saga is run on Banks Peninsula, a series of volcanic peaks rising to over 900m and penetrated by the drowned craters of Lyttelton and Akaroa harbours. It takes the form of a 7 plus 6-hour score event, with a compulsory campsite between. The event has been run for 7 years by staff and friends of "Ground Effect", a specialist cycle-clothing company which operates mainly by mail-order, and the event is as good as their gear. This year the saga attracted 275 riders in teams of at least two.
Starting at Little River at sea level on the southern side of the peninsula, the area extended to the campsite at Pigeon Bay on the north, with controls as high as ZZ, a peak of 914m just off the peninsula's highest point Mount Herbert. Even the lowest pass between the start and the campsite was 390m. Travel was by a mixture of sealed road, unsealed road, farm track and across country, for which the organisers do a huge amount of landowner liaison.
Over the years the navigational and tactical skills of the competitors, who mostly come from a biking background, have steadily risen, so that orienteering or rogaining skill alone is no longer sufficient to get a good place. There is also an increasing interest in various forms of mapsport from the adventure racing fraternity. This bodes well for MTB-orienteering in New Zealand, which is set to take off after the first national championship last year.
Full results are available on the
Ground Effect website.