The World
Games 2013 in Cali are over with a lot of memories in the head for this quite exotic
experience!
First, let’s
present what are the World Games: It’s a kind of ‘Olympic games’ for
non-olympic sports and it’s held every 4 years. We can find there some various
sports sometime strange and often unknown as orienteering, sumo, boules, tug of
war, paragliding, kayak-polo, korfball, lifesaving, speed roller-skating… But
also some ‘artistic sports’ such as dances or different kind of gymnastics, or
little some more famous sport like rugby (7), squash, climbing…
If you like
statistics: There were 26 official and five invitational sports, more than 3000
athletes and 1500 officials from 101 nations around the world. Only some 4500
volunteers and almost the same number of policemen were mobilized to take care
of the events and the participants. Finally, during the 10 days of
competitions, they registered more than 500 000 visitors. Finally, we can say
that we were very well welcomed!
The
atmosphere during the events was enormous and amazing. It was really great to
see other sports that we are not especially use to watch or that we didn’t even
know before; enriching to meet other elite sportsmen with similar or different
particularities on their sport practice; fun to experience the hot atmosphere
of the Colombian enthusiastic supporters (especially if some Colombian athletes
are in action). It was also very special to be like a real star as it was almost
impossible to walk around without being photographed by Colombian fan! (Even if
they had no idea who we were and which sport we practice, but maybe just
because we represent a national team written on our short…)
But let’s talk about the orienteering competitions because don’t forget why we went there: 3 races were in the event program:
- sprint: 11th (+47’’)
The course was held in some building area and
park of Cali and it was far from the trickiest course ever seen. The biggest
challenge was physically to keep a fast speed in spite of the warm sun above
the equator! I felt cooked and groggy from the very early controls of the race
but I still tried to push hard and I still manage to take some bad route-choices
(maybe to be sure that there were longer and to have some good GPS analysis… Or the
Pythagorean Theorem has to be studied!)
- Middle distance: 8th
(+2’02)
What was really interesting with this course
and terrain was that we didn’t know what to expect before the race contrary to
most of the main competitions nowadays, so it felt like real adventure or, at
least, a feeling of the traditional orienteering. The heat didn’t decrease much
from the previous day and it felt like another battle to push physically and we
could also meet the rough thorny bamboo in the green forest which was nothing
to compare to our nice bramble bushes present in European forest! I felt slow as
a tractor the whole race but it was apparently
the feeling of everybody under this heat and I also didn’t manage to avoid
mistakes while falling asleep and loosing contact… What we should learn from
this race is: never give-up (also technically!). With a horrible feeling and some avoidable mistakes, I
finished some 24’’ from the second place. (But I got caught by the impressively
strong M. Kyburz by 2’!) The French good performance of the day was done by L.
Basset with his 5th place only 8’’ from the 2nd rank.
- Mix-relay:
4th
It was a 4-legs relay with 2 guys and 2 girls
where I got the opportunity to run the 1st leg. All of the French
team runners have done an OK (average) performance but we all came with all the
controls in the right order that was the main point and it has not been the case of some other good teams
on these courses with a lot of controls and short forking. That how, we finished
on the foot of the podium, not far from the 3rd team, which was a fine
result.
Finally, the French
delegation has gotten the 3rd place of the medal ranking with 40
medals (16 gold) but unfortunately, we can’t say that we’ve really helped this
result in orienteering…
As
the orienteering events were in the last part of the program of the World Games, we had the great chance to take part in the thrilling closing ceremony in the Pascual
Guerrero Stadium. Over there, with more than 25 000 extremely enthusiastic spectators,
we could see some salsa show (normal in the Capital of Salsa) and listen the singing
big star Carlos Vives before to see impressive fireworks.
To
conclude, with all these amazing experiences: it’s definitely worth the trip!
Pictures: CNOSF/French Orienteering team runners/D. Hubman
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