The writer is one of Kalevan Rasti’s coaches.

Very nice piece like normal. In particular I thought the insight from the commentator was particularly useful. This makes complete sense to me that if the race is too short there is not the opportunity to communicate effectively what is going on. This assumes however that the broadcast would be live, and like so many sports, including those in the Olympics etc already, the broadcast is best presented as a package post event. In terms of a live event, I’m less convinced that any form of orienteering has any real appeal over a normal running event. Perhaps there is a little in a sprint sense, but I agree with you that a mass start, first across the line doesnt actually add anything to the event. The real issue is in the skill of the commentator.

In terms of a packaged event, a first across the line format does not add any value for sure, if anything it detracts from the sport. Relating to your other points about biannual wocs, I have been for a long time an advocate to return to this format and have something different (such as the world cup, but perhaps alternative types of WOCs) in the other years.

Great job Jan, keep up the great work, you are one reason why orienteering remains successful on the international scale.

Ben

I also believe it is highly improbable to go back to a biannual WOC. Particularly the East European federations want championships which makes it easier to fund their runners. There has been a big push to have annual EOC also.

1. WOC every second year
I think that majority of all orienteers think that WOC every second year is batter solution. At the end we might get more respect for gold medal and also more interest for world cup races. But in other hand we get even poorer IOF with officials who can’t get alternative canal to bring money in orienteering. We have WOC every year already 8 years in a row and still without any big IOF sponsor. Sponsors and media interest walk hand in hand but in our case we get sponsor and media support at WOC just because we have extremely good organizers. It is hard to accept that everybody or most of us (including fans) want WOC every second year and officials want to have it every year. I think somebody must tell them that they are not football officials and must stop thinking that they are something special because they run international sport organization. I really don’t like this approach where everything is so secret and then “famous group of people close to the matter” decide what should look like our development. If they can’t speak openly or make more wide discussion about different proposals that it shouldn’t be so difficult to make an official proposal from interested member federations. IF we really want WOC every second year somebody must start collecting official letters from members and deliver to IOF Council before they think that this is not very good solution. It is the best solution.

2. One membership class
As it is stated at IOF website
“The rights of a provisional member are the same as those of a member except for the fact that a provisional member may not vote at the General Assembly, nor nominate candidates to Council. This means that all IOF member federations are from now on allowed to participate in all IOF Events, including the World Orienteering Championships.”

IOF have now 71 member federations and at WOC 2010 we had runners from 42 member federations. Do we already have any information what kind of interest we have among those 29 member federation which might sent runners to WOC 2011? Can we expect 60-100 runners more? WOC q race for everybody will mean race for 160-200 runners on same course! Not fair at all. I am really looking forward what kind of q system proposals could be the best for all.

3. Regional championships
In global sports like football qualification system for World championships is based on quotas which are distributed among continents and not among countries. So if we want orienteering to be global sport something like this will happen one day in the future. We can’t have q race for 300 runners. As each continent get adequacy spots to it strength of member countries this could mean good solution also for Regional championships. This kind of system should also bring new WRanking sheme for national federations and runners.