National foot-orienteering squad member Jamie Stewart and John Fink won the 2006
Cyclic Saga on time taken, with two other teams scoring the max of 760.
NZ MTBO Team member Darryl
Taylor with Bridget Robertshaw won the mixed class just 40 points back.
Jamie reported that they used about 11 1/2 of the 13 1/2 hours available,
with the next team about 1 1/4 hours behind.
"Great event, all the controls in the right place and good route choice and
strategy the key. Awesome riding too." Sounds like a great improvement, tales
of controls not matching the map have marked previous events. Stewart also won
last year's event (with Aaron Prince), while Fink placed 4th in 2005.
Jeanette and Christine Wright won the womens class on a time countback, and third was also determined on time. NZ team member Dianne Michels' apparent disaster on day 2 was in fact an arithmetic error on the event website, and they were fourth. Di writes...
Rae (Kurucz) and I had a good consistant ride and we were pretty pleased with the result. The control placements and the terrain made for some great route choices and the challenges were really put out there for every one. Rae and I were by far the "oldest" team and the fact that we placed right up there with the young ones was pretty pleasing.
We started out on a chilly morning with an easy route to the first couple of controls (just to warm up!) We had taken a bit of time in the planning but picked up 8 teams on the way to the 2nd of our controls. The map was predominantly 3 parallel ridges of about 400m in height. We crossed these ridges to the river and collected most of the controls on the eastern side. The high point was Ben Lomond and the view was fantastic. After dropping down to the northern river and collecting controls on the flat we bounced back over two of the ridges to the overnight camp with 7 mins to spare.
The weather had been incredibly dry and I soon discovered that sheep pooh is like marbles to ride on! The fact that grass was not plentiful meant we could easily ride across paddocks and we were able to short cut stages as a result. There was still plenty of opportunity to push though and I was pretty pleased to have practised walking at the recent Taraua 24!
Day 2 started off cold and wet but by the time we got underway the rain had stopped. It meant the tracks weren't so dusty! We sort of scouted around and collected controls on the west side of the map but avoided the Big One on Mt Alexander. We had taken a bit too long getting back from the controls in the northern part. We had left lots of "outs" so we didn't run over time but in actual fact ended up getting everything we had planned at the finish.
I have had to keep this short as riding on sheep poo didn't work to well for me and the "lay down" on day 1 has resulted in a stress fracture of my right wrist. I have an Urban Rogaine tonight as part of the Trans Tasman Masters Games.
No rest for the wicked, Di. Full results...