Unconventional SKI-O long championship

Last weekend I took part in organizing Czech SKI-O championship on long distance. It was organized by Orienteering club Nové Město na Moravě my native club. Snow conditions were terrible because there simply wasn’t any snow in the area where the rece have should taken place. So we decided that we would make it on the artificial snow on cross-country and biatlon tracks in Vysočina arena in Nové Město. It was definitely very unconventional race. There were no dashed or spotted tracks on the map so the entire race was run on 9 meters wide race ski tracks, who wouldn’t love it.

You can look at maps here: H21 and D21

In the main cathegories there were three loops and athletes had to change a map in the arena. Even the lenghts and winning times weren’t as long as it should be on long distance but all (or almost all) athletes were satisfied and did find it as a big fun. And even though you can find the courses quite easy when you look to the results you can see that many athletes especially in the main cathegories were disqualified due to misspunch. They were just too fast and couldn’t properly read the map and codes on such a difficult tracks as are in Nové Město. So you don’t need to have dense network of tracks in the forest to make the race difficult. Maybe this is the way to the winter olympics? And if not it is just fun.