World cup 5th place on knock-out sprint

This year, the world cup season starts with the NORT (Nordic Orienteering tour).

This includes 3 world cup rounds in 3 Scandinavian countries:

The first stage was at Porvoo in Finland where we had a middle distance as a qualification on the morning and a sprint for the final. My technical performance in qualification was not good enough to be able to run the final as you can see on the GPS.

The men final was absolutely dominated by the Swiss team while the Swedish girls took the top places among the women.

Then, after running the mythic Jukola relay with our club in Finland, we went to Goteborg in Sweden for the second stage:

There, it was a ‘normal’ sprint as qualification followed by a ‘Knock-out’ sprint (spectacular race where 6 runners start together on the same course and the 2 first to cross the finish line are qualified for the next step). This time, even with some small difficulties on the beginning, I passed safely the qualification with a 10^th place. Then, the quarter-final and semi-final went good for me, so I got one of the 6 tickets to run the final. The final was more tough for me because I took wrong route-choices and I had difficulties to punch one control so I was struggling the whole race on the end of the peloton. Finally, I cross the line in the 5^th place, 8 second after the very fast Swedish guy: Jerker Lysell.

To conclude, this competition was a really nice experience (a little bit different than real classical orienteering but still interesting) where I took one of my best individual results!

Here is the live TV for the semi-final and final.

(Here is an article from the French federation).

Next stage of the NORT is a chasing start with the start time based on the NORT overall time standings after the two first stages (you can follow Live and GPS).