World Games Summary

Wednesday, 31 July 2013

Sprint - Annika Billstam (SWE) was 1^st.   Kathryn Preston finished 32^nd, after a rushed start due to an admin error, while Kiwis Georgia Whitla (33rd) and Rachel Smith (34th) were close behind. Men's race was won by Matthais Kyburz in 14.30 with Kiwis Chris Thorne 27th in 16.08 and Tane Cambridge 28th.

Wins to Minna Kaupi (FIN) & Matthais Kyburz (SWI) in middle. After what looked like a good run into 24th position by Kathryn Preston it was found that she had totally missed control 22.  This was a short leg with the control circle a little hidden by the water feature.  Kiwi placings: Rachel Smith 30th, Georgia Whitla 32, Chris Forne 20, Tane Cambridge 28th. The top 20 result by Chris was really impressive, as he is better known for his endurance exploits.

Below are some insights into the Games from the NZ team, quoting from their blog: http://osquad.blogspot.co.nz/

“Today the World Games middle distance competition was held in Rio Pance East.
This is a park/reserve near Cali popular for swimming and walking, and includes a number of outdoor restaurants. The majority of the park is a kind of spiny bamboo jungle, containing a network of big and small tracks, along with a few buildings and fenced off areas. This offered a good selection of route choice, and a bit more navigational difficulty, resulting in some more interesting orienteering than the
previous day.”

“The final race day was the Mixed sprint relay. The terrain was much the same as the Middle distance.  In fact half of the relay map overlapped the middle map. It largely encompassed an area of spiky bamboo forest with some open areas with long grass, and a physically sapping fast park bit at the end.  (The US & NZ teams had a bet as to which team would finish first and it came down to the last 5 metres of the event.)  Georgia Whitla had headed out with a handy lead but was being chased by Ali Crocker, who was in great form. Georgia held her off right to the last control where she punched ahead and the sprint to the finish began. They were neck and neck but in the end Ali just nudged Georgia out by 1/100th of a second. So all around a pretty well matched race within a race!  This gave the Kiwis 10^th place.

At the front end of the field there was mis-punches by Norway, Great Brittan and Czech Republic, Sweden didn’t have a full team as Tove was sick, but apparently mis-punched anyway. Switzerland was in control from the very beginning and had a comfortable win over Denmark and to complete an all red and white finish the Austrians took out the Bronze medal with a really good performance.   Swiss Matthais Kyburz was the runner of the Games, becoming the first orienteer to take gold in all three World Games races.

The Closing Ceremony was fairly amazing, consisting of the Colombian good old pass time of waiting. The place was crawling with Police and Helicopters circled above the entire time. Eventually we entered the stadium to 50,000 excited people. A lot of Salsa dancing made up the rest of the Ceremony (Cali is famous for Salsa), and it was topped off with some pretty amazing fireworks.”

The World Games site has all the results and allows you to follow all races by tracking, as all competitors had trackers attached.