WOC Long: Gold for Niggli and Gueorgiou

The favourites Simone Niggli and Thierry Gueorgiou won today’s WOC long distance after tough races were the winning time went more than an hour. For the women the route choices were deciding – while it was more about managing to keep the mental focus and push all the way to the finish for the men.

In the men’s race it was a very close race between Thierry Gueorgiou, Jani Lakanen and Edgars Bertuks. At the arena passing, they were all three within 24 seconds – with Gueorgiou in front and Bertuks the closest chaser. The at control 24 of 33  Bertuks makes his fatal mistake – loosing 90 seconds to Gueorgiou (see illustration below) – the 13 second gap increasing to a gap of 1:43. Bertuks first does a direction mistake, and then does a follow-on mistake when trying to relocate to find the control.

– I think I did a good pace until the end. I don’t think it was about the running speed, it was about the orienteering, Bertuks said after repeating his bronze medal from Switzerland in 2012.

Lakanen did not do any big mistakes, but Gueorgiou simply had that little extra edge at the end of the course.

Women’s race decided by mistakes

Even if there were some interesting route choice legs in these courses – which especially had interesting time differences in the women’s class (see analysis below), it was mistakes in the end of the course which decided the medals for the women just as for the men. At the control before the arena passing Simone Niggli was in the lead – only 3 seconds ahead of Lena Eliasson after Eliasson’s fantastic road-trip around left on the long leg (discussed below). Minna Kauppi was third at +1:04 and Tove Alexandersson 4th at +1:32.

Lena Eliasson looses her gold medal change to control 14 – loosing nearly 1:30 at this leg – but Eliasson is still in the fight for medals. Minna Kauppi looses her medal chances at control 18 – with a mistake of nearly 2 minutes – searching close to the control point in the green. Niggli looses 50 seconds at another tricky control in the green – control 19 – but at this point in the race Niggli’s advantage is already so large that the gold is secured. Eliasson looses the silver medal to Alexandersson on the leg to the last control. See all the mistakes in the below figures.

Interesting long leg

The most interesting leg in this race was the long leg shown above – going from control 10 to 11 in the women’s race and from 16-17 in the men’s race. For the women Lena Eliasson (12:57, 2950 meters) pushed extremely hard on the road – going more than 1:30 faster than Niggli (14:29, 2700 meters) going right. Kauppi runs 2200 meters direct in 14:18 – loosing more than 1:20 to Eliasson. Alexandersson (14:53, 2900 meters) runs hard right. Note that this leg is however not all about route choice – but just about as much about using your own strengths. Mari Fasting (13:37), who is strong in heavy terrain, runs Kauppi’s direct route – and has second best time on the leg.

In the mens race this leg was not as decisive – here Jani Lakanen (left) and Edgars Bertuks (direct) run exactly the same time.

Maps

• Map Long Final men part 1
• Map Long Final men part 2
• Map Long Final women part 1
• Map Long Final women part 2

See links to GPS-tracking below.

Results

Men

1	141		Thierry Gueorgiou	France	1:41:39
2	143		Jani Lakanen	Finland	1:42:57	+1:18
3	144		Edgars Bertuks	Latvia	1:43:29	+1:50
4	136		Dmitriy Tsvetkov	Russia	1:43:43	+2:04
5	135		Magne Dæhli	Norway	1:43:57	+2:18
6	127		Matthias Merz	Switzerland	1:44:20	+2:41
7	129		Daniel Hubmann	Switzerland	1:44:48	+3:09
8	121		Tue Lassen	Denmark	1:46:21	+4:42
9	130		Valentin Novikov	Russia	1:46:40	+5:01
	113		Kiril Nikolov	Bulgaria	1:46:40	+5:01
11	128		Anders Holmberg	Sweden	1:47:03	+5:24
12	132		Philippe Adamski	France	1:47:36	+5:57
13	125		Anders Nordberg	Norway	1:47:40	+6:01
14	119		Fredrik Johansson	Sweden	1:47:58	+6:19
15	120		Simonas Krpata	Lithuania	1:48:11	+6:32
16	131		Jan Sedivy	Czech Republic	1:48:15	+6:36
17	145		Tero Föhr	Finland	1:48:37	+6:58
18	122		Stepan Kodeda	Czech Republic	1:48:55	+7:16
19	134		Timo Sild	Estonia	1:49:53	+8:14
20	124		Ralph Street	Great Britain	1:50:19	+8:40

Women

1	43		Simone Niggli	Switzerland	1:20:02
2	45		Tove Alexandersson	Sweden	1:23:01	+2:59
3	41		Lena Eliasson	Sweden	1:23:08	+3:06
4	38		Minna Kauppi	Finland	1:23:44	+3:42
5	40		Tatiana Ryabkina	Russia	1:23:45	+3:43
6	28		Anni-Maija Fincke	Finland	1:25:51	+5:49
7	34		Emma Johansson	Sweden	1:26:32	+6:30
8	26		Mari Fasting	Norway	1:26:40	+6:38
9	31		Tone Wigemyr	Norway	1:28:06	+8:04
10	44		Catherine Taylor	Great Britain	1:28:11	+8:09
11	25		Ida Bobach	Denmark	1:28:46	+8:44
12	37		Eva Jurenikova	Czech Republic	1:29:26	+9:24
13	24		Dana Safka Brozkova	Czech Republic	1:29:41	+9:39
14	20		Amélie Chataing	France	1:31:01	+10:59
15	27		Sara Luescher	Switzerland	1:31:27	+11:25
16	35		Anastasia Tikhonova	Russia	1:31:28	+11:26
17	42		Natalia Efimova	Russia	1:31:37	+11:35
18	19		Alison Crocker	United States	1:32:30	+12:28
19	30		Aija SkrastiFa	Latvia	1:33:03	+13:01
20	7		Sarina Jenzer	Switzerland	1:34:05	+14:03

• Full results