2005 Australian 3-Days at Jindabyne - full report

Monday, 11 April 2005

De Haas makes a triumphant return home

Troy de Haas, contesting his first major event in Australia for several years, made a triumphant return when he took out the Australian 3-Days at Jindabyne over Easter, beating the strongest field seen domestically since the 2000 World Cup. He set his victory up on Sunday, when an outstanding run from him combined with scrappy ones by his nearest rivals to give him a seven-minute margin on the day. He lost some of that on the last day to the impressive Julian Dent, but still had enough in hand to score by a minute.

It wasn’t looking quite so promising for de Haas after the Saturday. The prologue was interesting in its own right – Grant Bluett coming from behind to register a narrow win, whilst former Australian steeplechase representative Martin Dent missed an opportunity for a breakthrough win when he missed a control – but, as usual, it didn’t resolve much at the front end. Saturday didn’t resolve a great deal either, but it featured a good battle between Dave Shepherd and Julian Dent, narrowly won by Shepherd. The two were tied at the front going into the long day. The early controls caught a few unawares, with Rob Walter, Tom Quayle, and de Haas all losing time in the first three, and de Haas dropped further with successive one-minute mistakes at 14 and 15, a stretch which most of the rest of the field were clean on. He was nearly five minutes off the pace on Saturday night in tenth place, and looked in a lot of trouble.

All that changed on the Sunday. Grant Bluett, who had been there or thereabouts all weekend, again led early, but dropped two minutes at 7. That gave de Haas the lead and he never let it slip. Julian Dent was initially close, but mistakes at 9 and 13 saw him drift backwards, and de Haas had caught him to the tune of six minutes after dominating the long 15^th leg. That leg also marked the end of the challenge of Rob Walter, who had held the gap at about two minutes after losing that amount on 6. After catching up, de Haas was content to sit on Dent until breaking away on the climb into 23, and went on to win the day by seven minutes. It was an indication of his dominance that he won 15 of 31 splits. A group tightly clustered for second were still more or less in contention for the placings, but one who was missing from that group was Bluett; he faded badly in the second half and ended up another six minutes adrift.

De Haas took a three-minute lead into the last day, which meant he only needed to avoid significant error to be reasonably safe. He hit the lead briefly two-thirds of the way through the course, then eased back a bit but had more than enough in hand, scoring by just over a minute. Julian Dent, still a junior, had already impressed enough over the first three races in such a strong field, but he took a further step up here, finishing full of running to win the day and secure second overall. Bluett showed that his Sunday was an aberration, running a very fast first half and coming through to share fourth with the consistently good Rob Preston, who could be well pleased with his step up in this field. Rob Walter’s consistency saw him in third place, whilst the biggest surprise of the last day was the disappearance from the list of Dave Shepherd, who was third going into the last day, but lost four minutes at 3 and more time over the next few controls before pulling out.

Allison withstands a strong challenge from Allston

As with the men, the elite women had a virtually full-strength field, although that is less of a novelty for them with fewer having been based overseas in recent times. Hanny Allston, taking a further step up after her outstanding World Championships of 2004, once again showed that she belonged at the very front end of the field – in a terrain, granite, where she hasn’t always been at her best in the past – but in the end Jo Allison weathered the storm to win Easter for the fourth successive year.

Opening skirmishes at Jindabyne on the Friday sorted out a clear top three, to the surprise of no-one. Natasha Key, with considerable international credentials in sprint racing, came through at the very end to pip Allison and Allston. The three were covered by eleven seconds, half a minute clear of anyone else, and the only dramatic thing to occur elsewhere in the field was the demise of 2004 WOC representative Danielle Winslow through a mispunch (she never got into the event thereafter and was well off the pace on the other three days too).

Tracy Bluett made a great start to Saturday and was in front by 5, but just when it looked like she was going to push seriously for the win, three minutes lost at 6 put paid to her chances on the day. That left Allison and Allston to fight it out. The 45 seconds that Allison lost at 4 proved to be decisive, although she still managed to get in front by a second at the second-last before Allston ran away over the last two legs, winning the day by twelve seconds and leading overall by eight. In something of a surprise, Natasha Key was nearly five minutes down, thanks to a scrappy start and successive one-minute errors at 6 and 7, and unlike her fellow Victorian Troy de Haas, was unable to work any Sunday miracles from a similar position, whilst Swiss WOC representative Sara Gemperle put together a second consistent run to be third overall at the end of the day.

As with the men, Sunday was a critical day. It didn’t feature a leave-everyone-else-reeling performance as the men did, but Allison proved to be the strongest on the day, taking the lead by 5 and then edging away leg by leg. A slightly wobbly start by Allston saw her two minutes down by 4, a gap which then stayed fairly stable to the end, whilst Allison Jones was very solid and just edged Allston out of second place on the day. Outside the placings, the performance of the day was that of Rebecca Minty, running her first high-level race for four years; the reports coming out of Canberra in the lead-up suggested that she was very fit, and she showed it with an impressive sixth place.

Jo Allison took a two-minute lead into the final day, and any real chance Allston had was snuffed out when she lost a minute at 3, setting the stage for her to be caught by 7. The two were together for most of the rest of the course, and also hauled in Allison Jones and Tracy Bluett, ensuring that the top four would stay as it was with the margins stretched a bit – a not-uncommon feature of the last day of Easter with the current start time structure. Allston and Bluett ran away from the other two right at the end, Bluett particularly impressive as she consolidated fourth in her best result since motherhood, but it was too late to make any impact on the lead, as Allison won by four minutes overall. Outside this pack, Grace Elson had a great run, with the fastest time for the first half of the course; she couldn’t quite sustain it but still ended up in third on the day, picking up two places in the process.

Barker leaves the others to fight out the JWOC places, whilst Meyer heads the junior men

The battle for JWOC team places is always a major feature of Easter, but this time, amongst the women, centre stage was taken by someone who wasn’t in that battle. Sophie Barker has not nominated for the 2005 team (she will spend the winter working in northern Australia instead). It was apparent after the first day that Jasmine Neve was her only real challenger, and when Neve dropped away on the second day (to disappear altogether on the last thanks to a mispunch) she had the race in her keeping, winning by seven minutes.

The rest of the W18 and W20 field was where the interesting action was happening, as four minutes covered six contenders for what turned out to be four places. Sunday proved to be a particularly interesting day, with less than two minutes covering the top six two-thirds of the way through the course. Some of the breaks made on the second half of this course were important, notably when Kellie Whitfield lost four minutes at 9, Ainsley Cavanagh two at 13 and Jasmine Neve two at the second-last.

Up until the end of Sunday Zeb Hallett and Vanessa Round looked the best of the rest, but both stumbled on the last day to make it a bit more interesting. Both were significant casualties of the short but difficult tenth leg, which ran downhill to a rockface (Hallett had already lost time at 8), which also claimed Whitfield and Cavanagh as victims – something critical in the light of the eventual team selection. Once the dust settled from that, Erin Post, who had been trying to get back into the race ever since things went awry on Saturday (with a four-minute mistake at 2 and assorted other misadventures), was left with a useful lead and kept it to the end, seeing her in second overall ahead of Round, who was also the W18 winner. Hallett completed the W20 placings, whilst in W18, Heather Harding was second and Rebecca Hembrow third, a respectable result given that she’d spent the Thursday night in hospital.

There wasn’t as much depth amongst the junior men, particularly once illness forced the withdrawal of M20 favourite Conrad Elson at the end of the first day, but there was quality at the front end as David Meyer, Simon Uppill and Louis Elson fought out the top placings. For the first two and a half days the margins were fine, and small advantages were crucial, whether they were Meyer’s explosive day-1 start which saw him 90 seconds up by 3, Uppill’s strong finish on Sunday which saw him pull two minutes out of the field over the closing controls, or twenty- or thirty-second mistakes here or there.

In the end it was the long 13^th leg on the final day that was decisive. Uppill lost two minutes to the other two here, giving Meyer the overall lead which he did not relinquish for the rest of the course. That leg also put Louis Elson back in the game, but he couldn’t quite go on with it, and a 50-second error at the third-last deprived him of the consolation of beating Uppill on the day.

The battle for second in M20 was also the battle for the last JWOC place. Matt Parton, a very fast runner who already had a prologue win to his name, had a disappointing first day. That meant he conceded three minutes to Ryan Smyth, and after two more days of stalemate the gap remained at that three minutes (give or take three seconds). In M18, once the Uppill-Elson contest was resolved there was a big gap to the next group. Rob Fell had two promising days, but crashed on the last, which left Kieran Sullivan to complete the minor placings.

W16 produces an epic contest

W16 is a class which has something of a history of producing drama at Easter, Phoebe Dent’s 1998 win being perhaps the most memorable, and they turned on a great race again this year. No-one was in the top two on more than one day, and after two days only four minutes covered the top eight. Marissa Lee led at that stage, but crashed on the first half of the last day and ended up seventh. In the end it was Bridget Anderson, who started the day in third, who held it together best to win, whilst Bronwyn Steele made an even bigger move, rising from seventh to second.

M16 looked like it might be as interesting going into the last day, albeit with only two involved at the front end. Tristan Lee held a lead of just over a minute at that stage over Simon Mee, and it was still close at halfway on the last, but Mee’s race unravelled from that point on and Lee waltzed away to an eventual margin in double digits.

Emily Prudhoe dominated W14 in the absence of her most likely rival, Belinda Lawford, winning all three days by comfortable margins; Krystal Neumann, who won on home ground last year, was the only one who looked like getting anywhere near, but her campaign ended at the fifth control on day 3. Lachlan Dow looked like he might run away with M14 just as convincingly as he built a six-minute lead over the first two days, but he lost time at the first control on Monday, and in the end only just held on over a fast-finishing Joshua Blatchford.

Veteran men decide their races in the paddock

Easter may have seen three days of reasonably technical granite orienteering, but M50 and M55 were both decided in the paddock at the end of the final day. Perhaps the biggest turnaround there came in M50. Ted van Geldermalsen had run well over the first two days and took a lead of just under four minutes into the last, but he faded on the third day and had slipped 27 seconds behind Ross Coyle by 16, with only the apparently straightforward last few hundred metres to come. It looked a lost cause, but he won five of the last six splits, retaking the lead only at the last control and holding on by thirteen seconds.

M55 was even closer, with only seven seconds separating first and second, and 25 seconds the top three. Bob Allison, Terry Bluett and Steve Flick all had chances through a fluctuating last day, with each in turn looking like they had the race in their keeping before making a mistake. Allison looked like he had enough in hand entering the paddock, but he had to withstand a storming finish by Bluett, who took big chunks of time out of the other two in the last few hundred metres, gaining second place but falling just short of the win. Another who might have been in the mix was Paul Hoopmann, but after winning the first day six minutes lost on the first three controls on Sunday were the difference between him and the leaders.

The best race of the rest was in M45, where the two Tasmanians, Darryl Smith and Mike Dowling, were so closely matched that the margins were in single digits on both Sunday and Monday. Smith’s two-minute lead after the first day was the difference in the end; it wasn’t looking that way for a lot of Monday as Dowling wrested the lead by 13, but he couldn’t quite finish it off against the strong-finishing Smith.

The only other veteran male race that was close was M60, which Trevor Sauer set up with a big win on the first day. Dave Lotty had whittled it from five minutes to one by the end, and Leigh Privett also got close after a disappointing first day. Elsewhere, it was a story of individual dominance. Jock Davis (M35), Rolf Gemperle (M40), Jim Sawkins (M65), Ian Hassall (M70) and Hermann Wehner (M80) all won all three days, only Hassall having a winning margin in single figures, and although Kevin Paine dropped one day to Brian Johnson in M75, he was never threatened once Johnson had lost more than 30 minutes on the parallel-error-friendly third control on day 1 (Jenny Hawkins, in W60, suffered a similar fate on the same leg).

Big comebacks and a bizarre finish

The younger end of the veteran female list is not noted for close finishes – the fields are often a bit too thin for that – but 2005 was a conspicuous exception, as the winners of W35, W40 and W45 all came from behind on the last day. W40 saw perhaps the best performance, as Nicola Dalheim won the last day by seven minutes to overturn a three-minute deficit against Christine Marshall. The victory was set up on the tenth and eleventh controls, where Dalheim took nearly five minutes out of the field.

The margins weren’t quite as big in either direction in W35, but Linda Sesta still managed to reverse a one-minute gap against Sheralee Bailey on the last day. This race also marked the return to orienteering of Louise Fairfax, although illness and a fair bit of navigational rust kept her out of the placings.

The final come-from-behind result was the most bizarre. Liz Abbott had a two-minute break over Carolyn Jackson in W45, and looked to have coasted in on the last day, stretching that lead by another couple of minutes, but it turned out that she had somehow managed to miss the last control, handing an easy victory to Jackson.

The other classes were all won by comfortable margins, although only Dorothy Adrian (W65) had the sort of walkover that was more common amongst the men. Sue Neve edged away from Robin Uppill over the first two days in a high-standard W50 duel before taking control more decisively on the final day. Meredith Sauer and Ann Ingwersen were both comfortable in W55 and W60 respectively, whilst Sue Mount had built up a five-minute gap over Maureen Ogilvie by Sunday night in W70, and was able to withstand some inroads into that on the final day.