Event Details
Club: | Pendle Forest Orienteers |
Event Name: | Gisburn Forest Long |
Date: | 19/11/11 |
Format: | MTBO |
Mapping: | Orienteering |
Time Limit: | |
National League: | MTBO 2011 National League (Round 12 of 11) |
League: | - |
Electronic Punch: | SportIdent |
Event Report
Sunshine greeted the 62 riders who turned up at Gisburn Forest in Lancashire for the final round of the national MTBO league. The event was a long format race which tests route choice much more than fine navigation, and Gisburn is a good venue; it doesn't have a dense path network but it does have many valleys and a mixture of very fast paths and some very slow ones. Which to take, the shorter, steeper “difficult to ride” path, or the longer safer route?
The longer courses had a feel of two halves. The first half in the north of the forest saw relatively short legs cutting on and off the waymarked single track but the second half in the south consisted of much longer legs with many choices.
The A course was conquered by Andrew Douglas in 83 minutes, impressively setting the fastest split for each of the last 5 legs. Chris Brand-Barker was 2nd, showing good form heading into turning senior (21) next year. Ifor Powell was 3rd despite finishing with two bloodied knees, and did enough to take the overall men's national league title.
The B course was won by local Graham Fielding in 71 minutes, who like Andrew Douglas on the A course also pulled clear through the longer legs in the second half. Tony Brand-Barker was 2nd and newcomer Richard Hope was 3rd. In the women double W50 World Champion Charlotte Somers-Cocks won in 79 minutes, with another W50 Angela Brand-Barker 2nd only 34 seconds behind (and also completing a Brand-Barker clean sweep of second places), with Steph Fountain another 2 minutes back in 3rd. Charlotte also won the overall women's national league title.
The performance of the day was on the C course. Edwyn Oliver-Evans won by an impressive 16 minutes. Where legs were common with the A course his split times were right up there with the best, very impressive for somebody who is only 16. 2nd and 3rd were Alex & Tom McCann with only 18 seconds between them. Great to see six under 18s out riding, they are the future of our sport.
It was also great to see so many new faces, hopefully all enjoyed it (weather helps!) and hopefully will come back. Many thanks go to Graham Fielding and his partner Gillian Welch who totally unpromted took it on themselves to put posters up for the event all around local bike shops and colleges. Undoutedly many of the newcomers had seen these posters and shows there are riders out there who are willing to give navigation events a go and their hard work is an example for us all.
Mark Stodgell unfortunately is injured and cannot ride at the moment, but that was good news for us as firstly he used his experience of MTBO to help run the start, and then went and took these excellent photos: http://www.stodgell.co.uk/?p=3352 Thanks Mark
A big thanks to all the volunteers from Pendle Forest Orienteers. As a club they've not organised an MTBO before but jumped at the opportunity of partnering up to put this event on, and it would've been a much more difficult job without them. It is a good lesson to help keep our sport going to partner up with orienteering clubs, they have all the resources to put on events like the SPORTident kit, map printing facilities, volunteers etc, and by showing them MTBO they hopefully will then carry on and do more MTBO events in the future.
A final thankyou to Sarah for putting up with me during all the mapping and course planning, sorting out permissions with the Forestry Commission, driving me around the forest in the dark on Friday night and baking cakes for us all.
Alan Hartley