British Championships and World Masters MTBO
New Forest September 27/28th 2025

Middle Distance - Hurn Forest
Sprint distance - Moors valley
Long Distance - Ringwood North

Planning started for this event over 18 months ago, so it was a relief when it was all finished and riders came back smiling having enjoyed the courses. Preparation entailed 3 map updates and mapping half of Hurn Forest, 21 courses planned and ridden to check, new paths made rideable with a garden rake and logs, ferns and gorse removed! Also 300 e-mails were written, 245 print copies and countless coffee and cake to see me through! There were hours of studying the maps and the day the finished maps arrived I still noticed bits that were not to my liking, but it was
too late then. So, the faults were all mine.

2 weeks before the event we only had 24 riders entered on each event, but luckily it went up in the days leading up to final entries. In the end we had 171 rides across the 3 events with competitors from Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Spain, Sweden,
Portugal competing and British riders from as far away as Inverness.

All the events were held in areas of large numbers of dog walkers and horse riders. We had placed notices around the forests but some people missed them and we had one unfortunate instance where a member of the public came to the start and claimed his dog had been nearly hurt and riders had apparently sworn at him. Our events are only given permissions as one of our codes of conduct in the MTBO rules state, ‘we must be courteous to the public and slow down’ so it is important to implement this.

Several paths were marked one way, as they were very narrow and in places quite fast, to save you crashing into each other and these worked well. We also had bridleways in the areas, which UK traffic regulations forbid racing on, so several controls were used to make sure you did not break these rules and gain an advantage.
The areas have also suffered by having control boxes and flags removed in the past during ordinary foot O events. We didn’t take any chances and grippled every flag and control box to an appropriate non movable item, usually a tree. Happily, we did not have any problems with this, just some signs showing you the way to the starts removed or turned to point in reverse direction shortly after being placed.

Hopefully you did not have to reverse direction to much on the courses The best route in MTBO is sometimes to go backwards out of a control and I tried to make you have to think about routes more when you were tired, but all courses were very fast riding.
It was good to see all the winning times were very close to the recommended MTBO
Guidelines. For those who took rather longer or it was your first attempt at MTBO I hope it has made you more determined to come back, improve your time and have great fun in the process.

British Champions

Middle Distance. Male. -- Alister Powell Course 1 21.0 km in 58.54
Female -- Janine Inman. Course 2 17.0 km in 56.41

Sprint Male. – Tom Davies Course 1 8.9 km in 26.23
Female -- Janine Inman. Course 2 8.0 km in 30.17

Long Distance. Male. – Tom Davies Course 1 35.5 km 240mts in 100.44
Female -- Janine Inman. Course 2 30.5 km.150mts in 99.46

We hope you all enjoyed the areas and courses we planned and look forward to seeing many of you next year at the World Masters Mountain Bike Orienteering Championships in Scotland 8th -12th September 2026

Kevin Pickering
Mapper, Planner and Organiser

Acknowledgements for all the help received for this event were posted in Bulletin 3,
Without their help we could not have run this event, so thank you again.

Also, thank you for all the kind words that people have expressed following the events, it does make it all worthwhile.