Route to Christmas: Day 21 2025

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is leg 14 from one of the most interesting sprint courses this year – the European Championships (EOC) Individual sprint in Belgium. 

This course has also been suggested for Course of the Year 2025 (vote here until Monday December 22nd), and was one of four sprint courses in the Top 15 as of this Tuesday.  The leg is as usually first provided without routes – you may take a look at it and think about how you would attack this leg (if the image is too small, you may click on it to get it larger):

Location

You find other maps from the area in omaps.worldofo.com here. See also latest additions in 3DRerun from this area in order to learn more about this terrain type.

Webroute

Next you can draw your own route using the ‘Webroute’ below. Think through how you would attack this leg, and draw the route you would have made. Some comments about why you would choose a certain route are always nice for the other readers.

Then you can take a look at how the runners have solved this leg below. The routes are colored according to fastest split time on the leg, with the fastest routes in green and the slowest in red. As you can see, this was a leg where straight (running in a S-shape) was clearly fastest followed by left – but many runners chose to run to the right which maybe looks more obvious on the map?

Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. As you can see, all the green routes are on the bottom of the list except for Kasper Harlem Fosser who beats a few runners on the red/blue routes – but even Fosser loses 15 seconds to the fastest split!

Looking at the lengths of the variants (note that there are several sub-variants for each variant), it is clear that straight is shorter. Also, right is slow partly also due to the many narrow underpassings and the need to take many small curves – but for me the green alternative does not look that much slower than the red alternative?

Here is an overview of how many chose each alternative – the number of top 25% finishers is shown using the darker color. It is clear that very few top 25% finishers (only 1) chose the green alternative, while 4 of 6 top 25% finishers took the left alternative.

Here is an analysis of relative time gain/loss based on performance:

Below you can see the chosen variant ordered by overall results. Note that also some runners running the blue alternative lost significant time here, probably due to doing some mistakes on this route (it is tricky to see that from the GPS). There is surely more information about this leg out there – if somebody knows more, please add a comment below to enlighten us (also if there is something wrong with this analysis, sprint analysis is notoriously tricky with the GPS-accuracy we currently have in orienteering live tracking)!

Chosen variant ordered by overall result

Chosen variant ordered by leg result

Density map

See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far (available during the day when some readers have drawn their route).

Additional information

You find the complete map in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.

Route to Christmas series

The Route to Christmas series is a pre-Christmas tradition at World of O – giving the readers the opportunity to do one Route Choice Challenge each day from December 1st until December 24th. If you have got any good legs in GPSSeuranta, 3DRerun, Loggator or Livelox from 2025-competitions, or old forgotten ones which are still interesting, please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll consider including it in Route to Christmas if it looks good. Route to Christmas gets interesting due to YOUR contribute!

Not all legs are taken for the interesting routechoice alternatives – some are also taken because the map is interesting – or because it is not straightforward to see what to do on a certain leg. Any comments are welcome – especially if you ran the event chosen for todays leg!