The winners of EOC repeat their success

The logic of the results of the European Championships was kept during today’s middle distance of O-Ringen’s Elitserien. Both reigning champions Simone Niggli and Valentin Novikov mastered the difficult course set on Dovra sjöar, in the surrounding of Örebro. Less stony than yesterday but as detailed, the terrain presented more green and swampy areas, emphasized by the continuous rain of the past days.

While the names of the winners sounded repetitive to one’s ears, the rest of the result list offered many unexpected rankings. The holders of the remaining podium places seemed indeed to be the first surprised by a such performance… One the men’s side, the bottom of the results contained two not unknown Swiss names, sharing ex-aequo the 40th place: Daniel Hubmann and Fabian Hertner. Did the reigning World and European Champions really suffered from the tough terrain, or did they decided on forehand to take this stage easy? Considering the laugh of Fabian Hertner when we questioned him yesterday about his goals for this week, the second hypothesis seems more credible.
Novikov’s nearly missed finish showed however that anything is possible in orienteering. Too used to the automatic finish line of the international championships, Valentin Novikov continued his fulminating finish sprint without punching the arrival control. He owes for one part this victory to the photographs, who told him with much shouting to come back.

Simone Niggli (1st)
“The race wasn’t as good as yesterday, I lost 1 minute on the 5th control. In a such kind of terrain, the most important is to have all controls right… My form is good and my training towards WOC goes very well, but I must say that couldn’t think that much about the legs today as there was so much to focus about!” Her 8′ lead in the general ranking? “There are still 3 stages left…“.

Valentin Novikov (1st)
“The map scale for the race was 1:10 000, which is much easier for me as I don’t have practice on 1:15 000 in Scandinavian terrain. I felt comfortable in the forest, but did anyways a lot of small mistakes, especially in the green parts where it was difficult for me to reach the control straight. It was indeed quite difficult, very detailled with green areas. I kept the speed during all the course and it seems like my mistakes were smaller than the ones of the others, and didn’t affect my result. Tomorrow’s sprint? I am not a sprint specialist. The goal will be to loose as few time as possible on the other runners. O-Ringen are a good preparation for me to WOC, where I’ll compete in middle distance, long distance and relay. I think that I have the most chances in the middle distance, but we will also have a strong team in relay. It is always interesting to run here because I don’t have that kind of terrains at home. Beside it, it is a good chance to earn money for everyday life“.

Tomas Stenström (2nd)
“I had a very good race and really enjoyed the course. The middle distance is my speciality, and I like such kind of difficult terrains. The biggest challenge was to adjust the speed. Some controls were very difficult, so I sometimes needed to slow down. I didn’t expect at all a such good result! I thought I could do very good, but maybe in the top-10. The course and the terrain just suit me very good“.

Lina Persson (3rd)
“It was a good race. I lost 1’30″ on the 6th control though. It was challenging the whole way: the beginning was quite flat with marshes, while it became steeper towards the end. I didn’t expect to reach that place. I have been really tired for a long time now and couldn’t run that much. My chance was maybe that it was so challenging, so that one didn’t need to run that fast to have a good time“.

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