Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Thursday, March 25, 2004 Peer nationsPeter, who is on the board of the U.S. Team, asked me to put together a list of "peer nations" that the U.S. could measure itself against. This is the sort of small project that I find very interesting. It is a lot like my job -- think about a framework for measuring performance.I'm not quite done with my first crack at developing a list of peer nations. But in collecting some information to develop my list, I've learned a few things: As an O' nation, France has some striking similarities to the U.S. Both nations have a small number of orienteers in the world rankings. Both nations have been sending teams to international competitions for about the same amount of time. Both nations are big (population and area). Both nations have a high capacity for funding a national team. But, France has Thierry Gueorgiou, currently the top ranked orienteer in the world. The current top-ranked U.S. orienteer is Brian May at 178 in the world ranking list. The list of IOF members includes some nations I hadn't thought of as O' nations. Chile, Columbia, Cuba, North Korea, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Macedonia, Malaysia, Moldava, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, and Thailand are associate members. Pakistan even has two different national organizations; the Pakistan O' Association and the Pakistan O' Federation. I met some Cuban orienteers at a training camp in Sweden in the late 1980s. I remember that they weren't actually orienteers. They were gym teachers, who liked to play basketball. I guess Peo Bengtsson had invited them to attend the O'Ringen and clinic training camp. In looking at some old international results, I was stuck by a huge change in the sport since the mid 1980s -- there are a bunch more nations now. At the world champs in 1987, the Soviet Union had a team. Needless to say, at the world champs in 2003, there was no Soviet Union team. Instead there were teams from Belarus, Estonia, Kazakstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine. If I had to put a bet on the IOF full member nation least likely to send a team to the 2005 World Champs in Japan, I'd put my money on Serbia and Montenegro. posted by Michael | 8:20 PM 
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