Life after WOC

Wednesday, 19 July 2006

The most notable things about being home are that it's cold and wet and it's really easy to stay awake to watch stages of the tour!  But nearly a week after WOC now I can reflect on the month over there.

All of us minimised travel this year and tried to make our stay as stable as possible.  I think this worked well, and it was one of the most relaxed and easy going WOC teams I have seen.  This made the trip a lot of fun and I think we all appreciated the supportive atmosphere through the ups and downs of the trip.

I was lucky to start my trip in Poland.  As usual the Poles were wonderfully friendly and the events well organised.  This was a good lead in to the detail we'd enounter later in Finland, although Dave must have thought we were having a lend of him given the number of times we said 'it doesn't get any harder than this'.  But it did.

WOC itself was combined with the Finnish 5 Day and suffered a little from this in that the organisers were stretched in catering for the 3000 or so foot orienteers.  Quite a task!  The WOC areas and courses were excellent.  Like nothing any of us had seen before.  It's hard to understand how many tracks there were out there.  I'd really love to find out who was making them all and get them to spend some time over here!  So the orienteering was fantastic and all the team loved getting out there each day.

The detailed nature of the terrain meant that we couldn't ride full speed.  All of us had to slow down to navigation pace and this is why the Finns were so dominant as they live on a stable diet of this type of terrain.  The other countries which did well were also those with lots of very detailed terrain.  I think this makes the Aussie efforts, particularly AJ and Alex, all the more impressive.

An interesting development, most notable in the men's races was the dramatic improvement in the standard and depth of the races.  We were all fitter than we had been in previous years and mostly rode equally well.  But the placings were not as good.  So whilst that was a little disappointing, mostly we were pretty satisfied with our rides.  But the results board was far more unforgiving of mistakes!

Another really interesting feature of WOC was the way the Finns used the areas they have.  All of the areas were foot orienteering areas and therefore the maps were not that big in riding terms.  But the course setting was really good and use of the detail on the areas very smart.  Also the maps were all 1:10,000 or 1:15,000 scale which took the best advantage of the terrain and allowed a lot more flexiblity in course setting. 

Thanks to all those who posted messages in the guest book.  We kept a regular eye on that and it was great to hear from you.  Thanks to all who supported us, especially OA for funding and organisation and the people at Netti, who provided the team with gear and our awesome Scott bikes.