These people hardly represent the opinion of the orienteers, they are more likely tycoons following their own agenda where money and olympic luxery for themselves are the gods.

I have more or less lost all respect for the decisions made by IOF

The WIF group was created following the 2010 general assembly to suggest a new woc program based on the decision to include a mass start event. We also had the constraint of including a mixed gender relay, though I can’t remember where that came from, and that the program should not be extended in time.

One possibility was of course to change the traditional relay to a mixed relay and either the middle or long distance to a chase or mass start event. The number of medals would have been slightly decreased (thus increased in value?) and one qualification would have been unnecessary. This would have met all requirements but when it was difficult to agree on which existing discipline to change the final proposal kept the existing program and added a mixed sprint relay and a chasing start event to give 6 medal events in total.

To keep this program into 8 days reguired that the qualifications were removed, but this only affected the long distance since 3 per nation could start in the chasing prologue.

After this proposal the WIF group was thanked and released and the process continued within the IOF council with the final result to keep the existing finals, add a mixed relay but still remove the qualifications.

With the decided future program it’s in my opinion no longer necessary to remove the qualifications. The organizers anyway stage a number of spectator events where the qualifications are not a large extra effort and it’s also today difficult for an athlete to take part in all events. The advantages of having qualifications are many, in particular that it is the most fair way of selecting a final starting field.
I doubt that it’s possible to create a qualification scheme based on previous woc results that won’t either use old results from retired athletes or being highly sensitive to individual results, e.g. mispunches. The proposed scheme certainly suffers from both.
The world ranking would in this respect be a better qualification tool and was favoured by many in the WIF group but lost a long the process within the council.

Removing the qualifications will not be of much importance to the success of future wocs but may decrease the participation in forest events from many smaller nations. Why change something that has been working fine before? I believe there are more important issues to discuss than the woc qualifications.