– Why is 2 different WOC in separate years a good solution? Wouldn’t it only confuse people outside the orienteering family? Also it will most probably not increase the status for the sprint, if that is the goal. Finally, I doubt the best runners will specialize less than now. A positive thing is that it would be much easier to find good urban areas for the sprint without compromising with terrains for the forest disciplines and vice versa.

– With two disciplines in urban environment and one mass/chasing start in forest, the remaining three (middle, long, relay) must move in the direction of a more interesting traditional orienteering. Courses like recent years in traditional disciplines (middle, relay and long) are boring and give little extra if we have sprint and chasing start.

– Too much arena passing, butterflies, track and road running is boring for the “real orienteering spectators” and the runners. If you loose enthusiasm from the runners and the orienteering family, you risk loosing everything (who will then organize events, watch orienteering on TV, train to be an elite runner, make local club trainings etc…). Neglecting demanding terrain and courses is a huge mistake. TV said after WOC 2010 that middle and relay was little interesting because of too much cameras and arena passing.

– More runners from the best nations is important. I believe our sport looses lots of attention from media and thereby market value by restricting the number of medal chances for the top runners from the biggest o-nations. But the best runners should as Hubmann points out be able to run all races.

– Mix relay is little interesting for media and runners, if we look to other sports like nordic biathlon. It is also actually bad for the smaller countries, since as it is now the strength of the female runners will be too decisive. 6 medal disciplines per year is too much, and the program is also too tight.

– 9 days WOC is a minimum if one wants 6 competitions (7 races). The weekends must be used, due to spectators and TV. The spectators don’t stay the whole WOC-week anyway, and it should not be that expensive for the smaller nations to stay one more day.

– Qualifications are a bad thing. The proposal looks quite good in that respect, except sprint qual. Use World cup standings and WRE instead. Letting all runners run the sprint is not necessarily a problem in urban areas.

But I believe it all boils down to the application of the concept and guidelines. Without focus on demanding and interesting courses, we might experience selection of arena/terrain and the type of course-setting we had in WOC 2010 in Trondheim. Other things to watch out for is proper TV-coverage. By having too small TV-budget you don’t get good TV-pictures, and by having too many TV controls you loose oversight and the result is bad TV. Finally, having WOC in peripheral places results in few spectators. To organize WOC in areas with little orienteering activity may sound nice, but it hasn’t been successful in practice.

One thing I don’t really understand is the blocks. It would be easier to combine more competitions if the similar events aren’t on consecutive days.

Holger is especially right about suitable terrains: “Better for the athletes and easier to find suitable terrains. There will be A LOT more places to organize the sprint part. I think both forest O and Sprint could benefit from this.”

Removing the long Q is a great idea – why do we need qualification for Long D? To seed the runners and to determine the start order? That can be easily achieved with the current WRE list for example. Top 5-7 nations get 3 runners quota, next 10 – 2 runners and so on. To be honest… the Long D is a tough race and it’s not for the small nations’ runners. You have to be in top 100 of WRE list to have a good result on Long distance. Start list draw system – all participants divided in 3 groups according to their WRE points and draw.

Similar idea is for removing the middle Q – then with the new system on the Middle final there will be a representative of every nation… for example 45 nations will take part and have an opportunity to be on the results list.

The problem of the current format on the WOC is that the small nations cannot get results on WOC Finals (except relay)— IOF has more than 70 member nations, 40 come to WOC and only 20-25 are in the results list. This is not a good advertisement of a worldwide sport!!!

So far I do not see any difference for the participants from top O-nations.

And now comes introducing the new disciplines… this is a demand – what shall be attractive for spectators and still valuable for orienteering? For example this year in cross country world championships 5 out of 6 races were mass start. Is this attractive and what spectators wants? And I guess that the WIF project group did a big research what would be the best for developing orienteering. Mixed relay is already successfully used at World Games.

My personal opinion about Prologue + Chasing start is that it will give a chance for good (fast) runners to perform better than good orienteerers but it will be very attractive to watch as spectator and wait till the run-in to see the champion.

Someone above mentioned and I also support it that a high quality TV-spectacular WOC can be organize by very limited number of nations under current conditions of huge IOF sanction fee and almost no sponsors. Hopefully this will change… one sunny day!

The value of the gold medals if there are going to be 6 WOC Finals?!?! It has always been the most prestigious to win the classic (long) distance in orienteering. “But sports medals embody the ultimate appreciation of an athlete’s talents and achievements in a certain discipline. Sports medals are not just mere material rewards but cherished possessions for athletes that will encourage all of them to continue aiming for the best finish in their respective events.”

If you have a problem to remember all the champions’ names… check World of O!

WRE events in 2011 = 106
WRE events in 2011 (without WOC, WC, ROC,..) = 82
Countries with WRE event in the past = 45
IOF members = 72
Max WRE events per year (without WOC, WC, ROC,..) = 216

WOC runner performance from new and developing countries should have impact on domestic runners. This should be worked out. As it stands now those federations will have even fewer chances to use those runners for domestic WRE events. Transition period may work in Europe as it is easier for runners to travel abroad on other WRE events but it is hard to see this concept could work on other continents. One problem is that ranked runners from Europe will not be very keen to travel on those even “smaller WRE events” and especially not far away. Second problem is that federation with only sending runners to WOC can’t produce enough domestic ranked runners. Federation or organizer interest to organize WRE is basically connected with goal of producing more domestic runners with WRE points.

At some past events (in Europe) accrued that WRE event has not gathered enough elite orienteer and athletes didn’t get points in both class. I had an idea that in this case we could use country mean points instead of registered runners mean points for calculating final points. To calculate country mean points only national runners which were running at last WOC should be used. Winner of this event could get maximum of 1,5x points of country mean points. This will mean that winner will get less than 900 WRE points. Runners could get ranked status on those events only when country mean is higher than 600 points.

This will give batter motivation for federations to send their runners to WOC and to organize in future year’s more WRE events at home. Stimulating national organizers to organize WRE events should be part of this new WOC programme for all member federations. WRE status should be free of charge as long as federation don’t have at least 6-10 ranked runners at the end of the season.