Simona Aebersold: more than a dream come true
Posted on | July 5, 2015 | Category: Arena
The goal was to be among the ten best, and Simona Aebersold hadn’t at all been thinking about how it ended, but the result is maybe not that big a surprise.
The Sprint winner from Switzerland is just a first-year junior, but for years she has shown a very strong capacity. Both last year and the year before that she won the Sprint at the European Youth Championships, and in the centre of the little village of Åmot in the district of Telemark, about 200 kilometres north west of Oslo, she had a perfect race.
“I felt the course was difficult, but I hadn’t any mistakes at all,” she says. As a quite early starter she took the lead and held it all day. “I was hoping for being among the ten best. I hadn’t been dreaming for such a result.”
The Swiss is born into the sport and has superb genes. Her father Christian Aebersold was a part of the very incredible Swiss relay team at WOCs in the 1990s. He was in the gold team in three championships in a row – 1991, 1993 and 1995. “When I was eight–nine years old I started to do orienteering on my own,” she says.
From the start she has showed a special talent in having the right speed according to the challenges. She is used to doing what she did in the centre of Åmot – running without mistakes. She is also good at reading the map and directly seeing how it shall look on the ground. “She is quick in getting the sense of the map,” her father says.
She lives about half-an-hour’s drive outside Bern, and a couple of days a week Simona, a student at the grammar school, goes into Bern’s training centre for orienteering. One of the coaches there is Simone Niggli, the world’s best ever. “I am glad I can learn from her. She has said that I shall not run faster than I can still have contact with the map, and so be sure what do before I run.”
Simona took part in the public races when WOC was in Norway in 2010.
The women’s course had 13 controls and the shortest feasible route was 3210 metres. Simona had a margin of ten seconds over the silver-medal winner Heidi Mårtensson. The Norwegian was very glad for her third medal in Sprint in a row. “I am so satisfied with succeeding on home ground,” the Norwegian says.
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