WOW what a busy July we have had – and we haven’t even had a Board meeting! Our athletes have been racing hard at the NZ Secondary School Champs (thanks PAPO for organising). We also have had athletes competing overseas in Genoa, Italy for WOC – check out Orienteering Wellington’s club post about one of the World Champs knock-out sprint semi-final relay legs that got comments from around the world!  JWOC in Sweden was exciting with some exceptional performances. 

Speaking of JWOC, it was a total surprise to hear from the IOF they had considered our bid. They’d told us they would be considering it later in the year and would let us know in October. However, at their meetings in early July they were pleased to award JWOC to ONZ. We are beyond thrilled. We’ve been talking about this with IOF for a couple of years and ONZ had put in a bid previously in around 2015 which was unsuccessful.  

The Board’s focus is now to ensure that we get the right structure set up to manage the event. We’ll be setting up a separate company with a Board and will advertise roles to run the event. This will include funding, logistics, and event delivery. A big focus of this will be establishing a great team to deliver the event which will be supported by volunteers – I know there’s already so many people keen to be course marshals! We really appreciate all the good wishes and enthusiasm from conversations, emails and messages from our community. A huge thanks to PAPO too – whose support for areas strengthened our successful bid – we’ll be working with PAPO to consider what support they might need from ONZ now that some major areas are embargoed for the next three years. The embargo will be updated as we get further into the organisation by the organising team so please keep checking the notice for updates. 

Take care – I hope you’re all caught up on sleep from all the overseas dot-watching.