An edited version of an article in the Vic MTBO e-news describing the events: 

A small group of Australians who travelled to Otago for the 2025 New Zealand MTBO championships on 1-3 February 2025. 

The sprint and middle was in Alexandra, an hour east of Queenstown. The first half of the sprint was in a hilly pine forest before moving into a sporting and school area to finish. This meant riders had to adapt quickly to the change in environment. 

The middle was in a private MTB park that could only be described as extremely hilly, rocky, rough and very technical riding. So mixing this with middle navigation required good route choice to try and survive the climbing. The event also included a 4km uphill climb just to get to the start.  

The long event was in a pine plantation in Naseby with a dense single track network and combination of long gravel roads. This was the pick of events with stunning scenery and great single track. The long course included 3 maps to cater for the dense singletrack starting with a 1:7500 insert, then 1:12500 for the main controls and then finishing with a 1:7500. Switching between these scales during map flips caused a number of riders issues.  

The final event was a non-championship rogaining event using the same location and additional controls that was used for the long event.

It was interesting to note the open men’s sprint and long events were won by Chris Forne.  Forne is a legendary figure in adventure racing and among other things, was the winner of the World Rogaining Championship in 2006 (NSW) and 2016 (Northern Territory).  Attached is a link to an interview with him from Endurance Asia entitled ‘The Worlds Best Navigator’ where he is interviewed about his adventure racing career including how he got into orienteering in  Endurance Asia
by Gavin Bennette and John Gavens