AUSSIES OVERSEAS
12th World RadiO Orienteering (ARDF) Championships Bruce Paterson (VIC)
some trouble to try to make the events more spectator-friendly with the finish in the town on an athletics track. All competitors are quarantined at the start point to separate them from their receivers prior to the five transmitters being turned on. This minimises cheating, but can make for a long wait, especially if you're near the end of the start list. Luckily the weather was perfect. A 6th transmitter was located at the beginning of the finish chute to aid announcing and displays of competitors times on huge video screens at the finish. The finish chute was over 500m long and quite an exciting obstacle course involving a river ford and steep banks, and all on video feed (also with live web streaming).
I did reasonably well in this event only losing about 12 minutes from what would be for me an ideal course. I placed 33rd in M21 out of 58 starters with all 6 transmitters in 106 minutes. Still a far cry from the winning Czech time of 53 minutes by Karel Fucik, but a respectable 1st place in the Asia-Pacific region. Adam Scammell (VIC) ran faster, but chose an appalling transmitter order, so he did well to get all 6 in 113 minutes for 38th before the 140-minute sudden death time limit (if you’re late back you DNF). Bryan Ackerly (VIC) runs as our “team backup” in case one of us mucks up. He ensures he gets back on time even if he has to miss transmitters. Bryan placed 44th with all 6 transmitters in 136 minutes. Bryan Ackerly at the World ARDF championships
In early September, three Australian RadiO competitors braved the European summer to compete in the World ARDF championships, this year held near Brno, Czech Republic. Bruce Paterson, Adam Scammell and Bryan Ackerly took on the rest of the RadiO world and came back with two Sprint titles and some good performances in the longer events. Curse of the Seasons
The team result is calculated as the sum of the best 2 times, placing Australia 12th in M21, a mere 4 sec after Estonia.
The difference in seasons mandates a few days acclimatisation, and this we did spending eight days training in Hungary under the tutelage of Gyrui Nagi and family. Gyrui is currently a member of the US team, but formerly a World ARDF champion when competing for Hungary. It was a pretty intense week near the small town of Orfu in southern Hungary, with two training events each day - a full scale championship length ARDF event in the morning and a shorter skills event in the afternoon. The skills events covered fox-oring, orienteering and speed transmitter location.
Park Champions
Calm before the Storm
Adam and I entered in a fairly laid back fashion in T-shirts & shorts and were even planning on walking most of the course. At the start there were many competitors in O-gear busily warming up and looking serious! We felt we'd better run initially as it would be too embarrassing walking with all these people sprinting out hard. As it turned out we both ran most of our courses, except in my case I spent some frustrating minutes looking inside the castle walls when in fact my first transmitter was right out the other side.
Feeling a little more confident about the daunting World Champs, we had four days off to make our way to Brno. Toured around wonderful Budapest, including the Budapest Cup Orienteering championship, then to Brno, Czech Republic, to be met by Jiri and his wife, a Czech competitor I'd met previously in Germany and China. Jiri has played a major role in popularising the sport amongst juniors in Czech Republic, and that is now paying off with strong Open and Junior teams.
Games are Open The championships attracted 440 competitors from 28 nations. Add the trainers, leaders and officials and you have over 700 people attending. These all descended on a nearby square for the Opening, which featured a band with Didgeridoo (!) and a “Champions” public park race afterwards with previous World Champions competing. One was, of course, our friend Gyrui.
Destination Boskovice The HF (80 metre wavelength or 3.6MHz) event was held next day near a town to the north called Boskovice. The organisers went to
On the “rest” day a public showcase Park Sprint RadiO event was held around and in the grounds of Castle Spilberg, right in central Brno. We'd never done this form of radio sprint event before. It consisted of a number of transmitters all going at once, all on slightly different frequencies. Beforehand we'd put lots of marks on the tuning controls of our HF receivers so we'd know where to tune to hear each transmitter.
Well that was fun. Despite the SportIdent they didn't have any results up so eventually we DECEMBER 2004 THE AUSTRALIAN ORIENTEER 37
