okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Sunday, July 08, 2012
Some nice results from the peer nations today
A quick look at today's JWOC sprint results showed some impressive results from among my list of "peer nations." Peer nations are a group of seven nations that have some similarities and that I've used as a way of looking at performance. The group is USA, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand and Portugal.
Among the men in the top 20 at today's spring you'll find 3 of the peer nations represented:
Joao Figuerido from Portugal finished 7th
Matt Ogden from New Zealand was 10th
Tristan Bloemen from Belgium was 12th
Among the women, none of the peer nations had a top 20.
I notice in your calculation for peer nations you make the distinction of European vs non-European. In a holistic world wide view this is quite relevant, but I also think there are significant differences purely in the continent of Europe. Take IRL and GBR. They are isolated islands. They cannot drive to other countries for races or training camps. In the centre of continental Europe orienteers can drive to many different countries to get valuable racing experience and training on new terrains and maps.
I think this is one of the main reasons GBR doesn't do as well as it could.