It’s great to see all the euphoria around Tim, Joseph and Ronan doing so well at the mountain running and X-country champs, but in terms of orienteering itself we perhaps need a bit of a reality check. The attached article “Upping the game” will be put into the next HP News.
Malcolm is making it available here so that we can, hopefully, get some comments to go with it. It deals with our aspirations to be recognized by High Performance Sport NZ and our ability to secure HP funding for orienteering. No doubt that some of you will not like what is written but, the fact is, it is a true picture of what we need to do if we want to make an impact. I would like in the not too distant future to have a Zoom meeting where we can discuss this, how in the light of this we should modify what we do, and how we can better organise regional training groups to help us on our way.

To add some context, as is referred to in the document, I have also included at the end of it the PDF document what the Swiss expect their orienteers to fill in purely to apply to participate in trial races. Read this, appreciate the expectations, and I think you will see where I am coming from.

As a final note, Malcolm has had quite a bit of discussion with Tim on this. Here as an example is what we have come up with as a guide if you want to purely qualify for a WOC sprint final:

Men: Run 3000m in 8 min 45 sec
Women: Run 3000m 10 min 30 sec
And maintain that pace for 50% longer (i.e. the duration of a sprint race) without minimal navigational errors. Those times probably also equate to about the top 20 at JWOC.

Read more on ONZ HP: Upping the game – Where to from here? Download PDF [197KB]