The international orienteering seasons is coming to the climax with the World Orienteering Championships starting on 5th July in Italy, to be followed by Junior World Orienteering Championships in Bulgaria starting on 21st July.

The Australian teams for both these competitions are starting to assemble in Europe to train and also participate in some warm up orienteering events.

Next weekend in Italy all the WOC team members will be participating in the three day Alpe Adria event in the foothills of the Dolomites just north of Venice. This event comprises a long distance race, a terrain relay for teams of three, a sprint distance race and a middle distance race. These events will give the Australian WOC team the opportunity for some race experience in Italian terrain and also a chance for the terrain relay teams (male and female) to compete before the all important relays in the WOC program. The sprint distance event will see the final trialing of the remote SI timing system to be used for the mixed sprint relay at WOC.

http://www.ortarzo.it/aaoc2014/en/
The WOC team will enter into their pre-WOC training camp on the Monday 30th June leading up to the WOC sprint distance qualification and final to be held in Venice on Saturday 5th July.

There will be LIVE results and GPS tracking of all the finals – see the link

http://www.woc2014.info/woc.php

During the WOC week of events there will also be a public series of events “Five Days of Italy”. Australia has a large group of orienteers competing in these events (48) and they will also provide a large support base for our WOC team during the week. Some of the JWOC team (Matt Doyle, Brodie Nankervis, Ashley Nankervis, Michele Dawson, Anna Dowling, Nicola Blatchford and Manager Karen Blatchford) are using these events to acclimatise to competing in Europe and to also experience the atmosphere of the World Championships- well known Swedish commentator Per Forsberg will be providing the commentary in the arena. They will be there to support the JWOC Coach Hanny Allston who is in the WOC team and all the other team members.

The WOC and JWOC blogs have been updated and will be used to provide more information in the coming weeks of the team’s preparations and performances. The JWOC blog contains some good updates on some of the team’s preparations leading up to their departure for Europe. The WOC blog has a report from Lachie Dow on his training and competitions in Italy recently.

JWOC Blog

http://ausjuniororienteering.blogspot.se/

WOC Blog

http://australianorienteeringteam.blogspot.se/

 WILDFIRE SPORTS AUSTRALIAN ULTRA LONG

Bulletin 1 has been released for the Wildfire Sports Ultra Long Distance Championships (NOL Round 5) to take place on Sunday 31st August. This event will be held on the Mt Kooyoora map which was first used for the WOC in 1985.

The elites will be competing to win a prize of a return flight to Europe and also other prizes donated by both Wildfire Sports and Dirty D. This event will also be the Victorian Long Distance Championships for all other ages. For these events there will be up to $700 worth of prizes available.

Wildfire Sports Australian Ultra Long Program.pdf

On Saturday 29th August there will be the Victorian Middle Distance Championships using the same map as the Ultra Long.

Victorian middle distance info.pdf

Entries are available on Eventor.