okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
Friday, September 30, 2011 WOC of the pastWith all the talk about the World Champs of the future, I thought it'd be interesting to reflect on the WOC of the past.I started orienteering in 1980. The first World Orienteering Champs after I began orienteering was in 1981 in Switzerland. The first thing that you might notice about WOC in the past is that WOC was only held every other year. The winners of the individual races were two of the all time greats - Oyvind Thon of Norway and Annichen Kringstad of Sweden. Norway took all three medals among the men and a silver among the women. Sweden took the women's bronze. Another thing you might notice about WOC in 1981 is that there were only 2 individual races - one for men and one for women. No qualifiers. No middle or sprint. One day, one race, one champion. The relay champions were Norway (men) and Sweden (women). The winning times were over 4.5 hours for the men and just under 4 hours for the women. You might notice that the relays were a good bit longer. If you looked at the results lists, you'd also notice that "back in the day" a relay team had 4 runners. If you were to look at the results lists, you'd see 83 men and 72 women. But, you wouldn't see any runners from some of the nations that you see at most WOCs these days. There were no runners from the Baltic nations, for example. No runners from Spain or Portugal. If I could take one feature of the 1981 WOC and bring it back, I think I'd return to having a WOC every other year instead of every year. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 7:09 PM
Comments:
Hi,
Can you explain more about qualification system for WOC1989 which was held in Sweden. From which WOC onwards qualifications races were on the program? As I got the info. every country without any qualified runner from A/B/C qualification races had a chance to put the best runner in A Final and others run B final. Do you still have any Bilten/IOF rules for this WOC? BR, Samo
No big surprise there were no runners from the Baltic nations, simply because there were no Baltic nations at that time! ;-)
I think the qualifying in both 1987 and 1989 worked the same way. The top 25 in each of two qualifying races made the final. If a nation had nobody in the top 25, the nation's best placed runner qualified. If a nation's best placed runners had the same place, the runner with the shortest elapsed time qualified.
Michael
Thanks.
I checked, for WOC89 were 3 qualifying groups at least for women. That was info. from our runner. But it is hard to find any data or results from qualifications. In official IOF statistic I found only final results.
You can find complete results from all WOC´s at http://maprunner.co.uk/ [O Records -> WOC Database ]
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