WC Final: Fantastic orienteering and nature
Just take a look at the pictures, the sattelite pictures and the maps - they
speak for themselves: The next week will be a fantastic one for all those
lucky enough to be running the World Cup Final in France. The venues
for the competitions are close to the city Clermont-Ferrand and the famous
volcano Puy-de-Dôme in Massif Central in south-central France. Who hasn't seen the famous
picture from Puy-de-Dôme by Yann Arthus Bertrand?
Picture (C) "Earth from Above" by Yann Arthus Bertrand
Venues
Below you see the venues for the competitions in Google map
(you can zoom in, change map type, etc.). Note that
the venues are based on the Bulletins from the organizers,
and may not be 100% correct as that information is not
complete.
Extremely difficult orienteering
Based on information from the runners who have been there training
and comments from several national team trainers, the orienteering will
be extremely difficult in the WC finals. You can for example take a
look at Belgian Fabien Pasquasy's page, where he tells all about his
perfect middle distance competition - until the second last control -
where a 12 minute error ruined his competition. Simone Luder says on her homepage that accurate map contact is required
at all times - if you loose map contact it is extremely difficult to find
back to where you are. Thus, errors may get really big.
Who can beat Thierry?
This years World Cup final sounds like the perfect setup for Thierry G. on
home ground. But even Thierry can make big errors in this difficult
terrain, as you can see from what Øystein Kvaal Østerbø writes on his
homepage:
At the Middle-distance I lost around one minute both to the 4th and 6th control, but ran quite well the rest of the course and used 35 min at 4,3 km. I was 40 second behind Anders Nordberg, while Damien Renard who won the French race was 2 min faster. Thierry Gueorgiou did several bigger mistakes, and used the same time as me.
Can't travel there? Fly there!
For those of you who have not the possibility to go to France
next week, you can at least take a look at the are through
Google Earth. Unfortunately, there is snow in the area in the
satellite pictures in Google Earth - but you will get a good
impression of the area nevertheless. The map overlays for Google
Earth are quite big, so download will take some time for you on a
slow connection.
The maps for the Google Earth files are taken from the homepage
of Fabien Pasquasy and Thierry G.. Direct link to the maps for the embargoed areas for the WC final: Sprint Qualification and Long final.
For those of you who have no possibility to use Google Earth, you can take
a look at some snapshots below:
Live results
The official site of the WC Final is here. There will be live results from the
World Cup final according to the organizers.
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