British pair John Kewley and Ifor Powell have won the single event which forms this year's IOF Marathon-Orienteering Trophy. The event was a 2-day mountain marathon in Spain, and attracted 72 teams from Andorra, France, Portugal, Great Britain and the host country. Last year's trophy was a 3-event series including the World Rogaining Championship in Canterbury, New Zealand.
To borrow from Kewley's report in the British magazine CompassSport: "Unlike the 3 race series that formed the 2000 trophy, this year saw a return to the 1999 format with a single race deciding the Men, Women and Mixed titles. GB has a good record in the mens category with 2nd place for Mark Seddon and Andy Trigg in 1999 and 2nd place for myself in last year's three event series (with Swiss Felix Moser)."
NZ comment: the 2000 series was a bit of a joke, with hardly anyone taking part in more than one of the three events. It is quite difficult to maintain a pair over several events, especially in an unsponsored minor sport when the events are in different countries. To our knowledge, applications for running the 2001 event were never called for, the Spanish event suddenly being announced earlier this year. NZOF has proposed to both the Czech organisers of next years' 5th World Rogaining Champs, and the IOF, that the marathon-orienteering trophy alternate annually between a mountain marathon and a rogaine.
Meanwhile back at home, Red Kiwi Orienteering Club has been talking about reviving the mountain marathon. The last one was run at Waiouru in Jan 1994.
Thanks to CompassSport for those words. The privately-run British orienteering magazine
carries excellent coverage of endurance orienteering (5 pages in the latest issue)
and MTB-orienteering, in addition to traditional orienteering activity. And so,
of course, does "NZ Orienteering", the magazine of the NZ Orienteering Federation.
Written by Michael Wood
and installed on 29 Oct 01