30 nations represented at European Championships
Posted on | April 9, 2014 | Category: News
Competitors from 30 nations will be taking part in the European Orienteering Championships starting this week in Palmela, Portugal. 19 nations are represented at the European Trail Orienteering Championships being held at the same time and venue. These will be the most prestigious orienteering events ever held in Portugal.
181 men and 131 women will compete in one or more of the European Championships (EOC) races, and there will be 127 competitors in the TrailO Championships (ETOC), with 103 of them competing in the TempO competition. 46 of the ETOC competitors hold Paralympic status.
In the EOC there are seven days of racing: qualification and final in Sprint, Middle distance and Long distance, and a Relay. The first race, tomorrow (Thursday), is the Middle Qualification, and the first of the finals is on Sunday when the women’s and men’s Sprint finals will take place in the late afternoon. The last day of racing is on Wednesday when the Relay will be held. The three individual finals also count for World Cup points.
The Sprint races will use an old village area with a multitude of paths, roads, stairs and alleyways plus some park and detailed non-urban terrain. All the other races are in clean open forest, some with gentle slopes and other areas quite hilly, generally runnable with a sandy base and very few stone details. But there will of course be some highly detailed contours challenging the best in navigational terms and allowing for interesting route choice alternatives on the longer legs.
ETOC covers 4 days: TempO qualification, two days of PreO and TempO final, starting on Sunday and finishing on Wednesday. The TempO competition – the relatively new fully-timed version of TrailO – will be on golf courses, whilst the PreO, the ‘traditional’ form of TrailO with a couple of timed controls, will be in valleys with open and semi-open landscape with varied contour, vegetation and rock detail.
Full details of EOC and ETOC can be found in Bulletin 4, just published on the very informative event website www.eoc2014.fpo.pt. Here you will also find live coverage of the races including tracking of all the leading competitors in the finals, and a full results service.
The IOF website will carry summaries from each day’s competition together with leading results.
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