Discussion: US JWOC Team announced

This from thewaterstop.org posted by Janet Porter yesterday:


I would like to announce the Final selection of the 2005 JWOC Team.

Males
Leif Anderson - SAMM
Will Enger - SAMM
John Fredrickson - HVO
Marty Hawkes-Teeter - EMPO
Robbie Paddock - NTOA
Mike Kerzhner - NEOOC

Females
Viktoria Brautigam - CSU
Siobhan Fleming - UNO
Sarah Klaben - USMAOC

Team Coach - Alexei Azarov
Team Leader - Ross Smith

Congratulations and Best Of Luck!

Janet Porter
US Junior Team Leader

congratulations to all team members. good luck in...Switzerland, is it?

Congratulations to everyone! And if you need any help please let me know. I will be at the Swiss 6 day, and could always help with logistics, translating, or just simply holding coats at the start or providing tap:-) would be glad to help!

Sandra, you are just the person to help me out! I have been trying to figure out how to get train tickets from Salzburg, Austria to Tenero, Switzerland, but the only train information page that I can find is eurorail.com, and it doesn't seem to even have Tenero in it's database. Is there a local Swiss train website that I might be able to use to get a better selection of routes?

Google doesn't seem to pick up any of the local train websites. Eurorail.com has taken over the entire search area.

John, try the Swiss rail site. That should have what you're looking for.

In my (admittedly limited) experience with trains in Switzerland, I never had a problem buying a ticket just before boarding. Doesn't hurt to be prepared, of course. ;-)

I've always had good luck with bahn.de. it seems to cover every station in europe.

Thanks guys, those sites work great.

yeah, those two websites are the best to use. On the Swiss web page you can buy tickets for other countries, and pay with a credit card. The most important thing would be to reserve a spot, the ticket you can always buy when you get there. Are you guys staying in Tenero? Not Bellenzona? If you have problems finding information to Tenero, it's probably because you have to take a bus from a more major town like Bellenzona, Lugano, or Lucarno!
I was just in Tessin over the weekend with the Swiss junior team, and MAN is it steep. You should be running up as many hills as you can between now and JWOC! Expect somewhat rocky ground to very rocky ground with cliffs on steep slope, with deep re-entrants. There are also lots of hazelnut shells (small spiky balls) on the ground and fallen leaves making running speed sometimes a little slower, but all in all clear ground.
The orienteering is not particularly hard, but it will be physically very demanding!

Based on the maps on the JWOC website, it looks like the steepest terrain I have ever seen. I wonder how it compares to the terrain at WOC 2003.

The terrain of this year's JWOC is quite different from what you might have seen at WOC 2003 (at least we Swiss think so). The races are going to be much more technical. The terrain is probably as steep as the qualification race for the Classic at WOC 2003. Running along the steep slopes or route choices along them are going to be the key point. Especially controls along the slopes are very hard to find since you have to have a feeling for how much climb you've just made or how much you dropped. Like at the World Champs two years ago you can expect some long route choices. There are usually not many options, it's just always very hard to even find them. If you have a chance to look at the maps before the races, try to memorize the small trails along the slopes, they can be very, very helpful.
Other than that it's just normal orienteering. The strongest and technically most skilled orienteer is going to win...

Mmmmm, Hazelnusse....mit Chocolade. Sehr Aagghhghghghghhh...

Check out maps from the Norwegian junior team's training camp in Switzerland at:

http://oystein-sorensen.com/artikler_sveitsmai2005...

Good grief! Could there *be* any more contours? They should just print on brown paper and add some white...if necessary.

You callin' them-there little hills steep? They use those little 5m contours on their 1:10000 maps and they've still got space between the lines. Just come to BAOC's Huddart Park map where even the 7.5m contours squeeze together in parts of the 1:10,000 map... Swampfox ran a course I set there long ago - the start was ~2.5km away from the finish, and 500m _above_ the finish. Blue was 5km, 300m climb, which meant it had 800m of vertical drop. The forest was reasonably open, but it was simply the steep ground (even downhill) that had top times around 11-13 minutes/km.
look for January 22nd, and 28th... Unfortunately, I don't see any BAOCers on the JWOC team this year...

No wonder that Norwegians are so good. Very well planned training runs (2-3 courses each day). If only our juniors could get this kind of training! Somehow USOF need to raise $20K for junior training each year of similar quality. I wonder where from Scandinavians get money for all these training camps for junior and senior teams (at least twice or so a year). That should run about $100K per year for both teams. Add additional $100K for WOCs and WCs. Their junior and senior team budget should be at least $200K/year plus all coaches expenses.

You tell 'em, Wyatt! The majority of our BAOC maps look exactly like these two, in terms of both steepness and overall contour detail. This is European terrain I could be comfortable in!

Of course, most of you members of the "East Coast Flat Earth Society" no doubt think differently...

If only our juniors could get this kind of training!

TJOC.

Unless the US wants to try and pull off the French model of intensively training a small cadre of elite orienteers, I suspect a lot more cheaper, somewhat lower quality training closer to home would be needed before thinking of mounting a training camp on the scale the Norwegians just did, i.e. one reason, finances aside, the Norwegians can and do run such a camp is that their juniors are already good enough to benefit from it enough to justify the effort.

Or, put another way, they have enough good juniors to justify the effort. My guess is that every town in Norway with more than 10,000 residents has more sub 10:00/Km juniors than all of North America.

If we had the kids, I don't think the $20K would be much of an obstacle. Football and baseball camps routinely run that kind of budget simply by charging each participant several hundered bucks. I'm not suggesting that that's the optimal funding model, but it's a common one that works.

Another reason they can afford is because of the support they get from their govt. When I was in Norway during the Lillehammer Olympics (in which the Norwegians were doing VERY well), their minister in charge of sport was asked about the funding for their athletes. What he said was basically that they felt every Krone they invested in fitness and sport saved them 2 kroner in health care.

Norwegian athletic organizations get a lot of funding from the state-run lotteries. The surplus is split evenly between the arts and sports. In 2004, this amounted to $382.5M, or roughly $85 per capita.

For the arts, 2/3 of the money is assigned by the parliament, and 1/3 by the King. For sports, it is all assigned by the King. So I guess athletic organizations will write the King some letters, and then get a check in the mail at some point.

Actually, there are websites with the details of how the money is assigned. You can search for sports-specific assignments here.

Both O-maps and ski-O-maps are listed as a separate category in the search engine for funded projects.

We stuck in a circle. No money -> no means to do good quality training -> no results -> no sponsors -> no money.

With eroding competitive base (number of juniors at the A competitions is droping each year and is at so low level) we should expect even worth to come. I think each cared senior must take a personal goal of bringing and coaching at least couple juniors locally to allow the sport to progress and not regress or stall as I have been witnessing for the last 5 years while doing orienteering in the USA.

Big complements to NTOA for their wonderful work with juniors! Lets do more for our young generation.

If 1 krone in sport funding saves 2 kroner in health care, maybe we should try asking Blue Cross Blue Shield or something like that...

No, let me be more serious.

Sergey, I usually don't bother responding to your posts about how far behind competitively North American orienteering is, but let me try this once. I don't think the goal should be to worry about the competitive level of the national team or national junior team or anything to do with results at the world level. These things will come naturally with healthy competition on the domestic level. Lots of exciting competitions at the domestic (national and local) level mean sponsorshipwill come. They are the first thing to work at.

Most O clubs are terrible at promotion, because the kind of people that like orienteering tend to hate doing promotion. I hate it myself. If your idea of a fun time is running around by yourself in the woods, you tend not to be brilliant at sales and marketing. We at CSU are a classic example. We have eight events on our schedule this spring, but our only promotion was through our own email list and NEOC's email list (plus Attackpoint). This is an example of how not to do it, but why it happened like this is easy to understand - it's much easier to put on our kind of low-key, informal events than to put the time and effort into training, admin, marketing, permits (we don't even usually bother since our events are so low-key, so this is another incentive for us not to market...) But we need marketing to grow the sport. Compare adventure racing, where the races are put on by for-profit organizations, who provide a lot of services, charge a lot ($250 a team for an eight hour race is normal), so they have to market things better...

Saying that every $ invested in some pet program saves $$ somewhere else is a pretty common comment from a politician. I've never seen any such statement backed up by hard evidence. My guess is that investing in sports has a pretty negligible effect on health care costs (might even be negative - the only time I ever go to the hospital is after messing myself up in sports).

Nor do I think that government sponsorship is a particularly good way to grow a sport. It may work, but other things work better. When I first started bicycle racing in 1978, the national federation had about 2000 members - similar to USOF today. Ten years later it had 85,000. I'm not aware of any increase in government funding during that period.

What did happen was Greg Lemond. As much as I never really cared for the guy, I have to admit that he completely changed the way Americans think about cycling. It was no longer a sport that was just done over in Europe - it was a sport that we could win at.

Lemond was not a product of a government program. He didn't even attend a national training camp until a few months before winning Junior Worlds. Nor did he benefit from corporate sponsorship. He was just really good.

I don't know if anyone like that will come along in US orienteering. Even if they did, the fact that orienteering is a media disaster would probably limit the impact. Rather than trying to change to world, I will continue to try to put on a quality event every year for the people who care to attend such an event.

"My guess is that investing in sports has a pretty negligible effect on health care costs (might even be negative - the only time I ever go to the hospital is after messing myself up in sports)"

According to the CDC, 300,000 people die annually in the US due to health problems related to poor diet and physical inactivity - far more than die of broken bones or twisted ankles. The "annual cost of obesity" is estimated at $117 billion - (probably) also a lot more than the cost of people twisting their ankles. Maybe pumping money into public health campaigns isn't the answer, but there's definitely a great disparity between the importance placed on physical fitness in the US vs. other countries.

I worked for the CDC many years back. I don't take issue with their numbers or their conclusions. However, that does not imply that pumping money into national sports teams will have ANY impact on health care.

We are already the most sports oriented country in the world. Our athletes make the most, enjoy the highest profiles, and are generally revered by the population. The incentive to participate in sports is already quite high. The fact that people aren't doing it is due to far more fundamental cultural issues, not a lack of funding.

[economist hat on]
The crucial question is the marginal effect of another dollar spent on sports on health care expenditures. There are several possible effects of spending money on sports participation subsidies. One is that it encourages participation by those who otherwise would have been inactive. In this case public expenditure on sports will reduce health care costs. Another is that it will not affect participation of the inactive, but will increase participation of the already very active. In this case health care costs will increase due to increased injury (and there will also be a net transfer to the organizers of sports events). A last possibility is that it will not affect anybody's participation in sports, in which case the expenditure just acts as a transfer towards participants in sports and to the organizers of sports (how this is divided depends on how the entry fees are set, whether the events are for-profit, and the market power of organizers).
[economist hat off]
My best guess is that sports subsidies have a little of all these effects, but the return on a marginal $1 of government expenditure through reduced health expenditure is way under $1.

There are definitely broader cultural issues at play here. For example, why are there so few clubs for adults to play baseball, basketball, or football of various kinds? Part of the reason is that the sub-professional level is taken by the NCAA, so there are few non-college based clubs in these sports. I think the NCAA is one of the most unhelpful institutions to have evolved from good intentions anywhere. Admitting athletes preferentially diverts universities from what they do best (education), and means that the most active participants in sports play in a school environment rather than being the mainstays of community-based clubs. More discussion of this from an Australian perspective here, although we are kind of off topic now.

BTW, none of these comments should be taken as an indictment of our current juniors. Congrats to all, you have risen to the top of the sport in the country you live in and that is no small thing.

Sergey wrote:

"With eroding competitive base (number of juniors at the A competitions is droping each year and is at so low level) we should expect even worth to come."

Help promote TheWaterStop.org. What we need in Junior Orienteering is a more unified community of Juniors from across the country. If we can make TheWaterStop the place for juniors to hang out between meets than we can keep them excited about Orienteering and turning down soccer and baseball teams for Orienteering events.

Check out Project Waterbug.

If you really want to improve our results in international meets, you need to start promoting Junior Orienteering. TheWaterStop.org is your tool to do that.

My point wasn't to argue the pros and cons of spending money on sport and the subsequent effects this may have on health care but rather to point out that if this is your general belief and is supported strongly by the voting public, then sports organizations, ie those in Norway, likely DO have a lot of money to spend. This in turn may allow them to send Junior orienteering teams to expensive training camps in other countries.

:) John proves himself the opposite of Will.

"This traffic report brought to you by TheWaterStop.org:
Holy Crap! The beltway is chaos. Got a report of a meteorite impact on Rt 50. I-95 is your alternate route there. The lava flow blocking the outer loop has been pushed off to the side but there are still rubber-necking delays all along the top side. Dogs and Cats living together - its insane out there! Don't leave the house. I repeat...do NOT leave the house. Also be sure to visit TheWaterStop.org for all of your junior orienteering needs."

Sorry John...I couldn't resist :) Great advert there.

Hehe, that's one way to write it Eddie.

By the way, I would really like to get some more connection between the Juniors and Seniors, and I have been trying to think of some ways to do it. I am considering starting a weekly discussion topic at TheWaterStop where peopl can discuss things like their favorite training excercises, their craziest experience at an O-Meet, or something along that line. I would like to create a more unified community among the Juniors and Seniors, and if we can get people interested in something like this, it would definitely be a step in the right direction.

Let me know if you have any other ideas.

[borrowing someone else's economist hat]
I may have understood some economic concepts wrongly but I would have thought the marginal effect of another krone spent subsidising sport was the crucial point only if the question was whether Norway ought to spend yet more subsidising sport. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that the Norwegian government has already identified and adequately funded those sporting projects that are cost effective in terms of health benefits, one must conclude that additional expenditures would have to be on projects not justified by the benefits.
{returning the hat - hopefully it wasn't missed]

The US may be the most sports-oriented nation on earth but that does seem to largely mean that much of the male population spends as much of their leisure time as possible oriented so their field of vision includes someone else being physically active. To seize on another point, the incentives to participate in sport here are very high provided the sport is football, baseball, basketball or hockey and you're good enough to make it into the professional leagues. Witness all the former high school and college athletes gone to seed once it became clear that wasn't the case for them. It would testify to heroic faith in government social engineering to claim Norwegians have a more active lifestyle (to the no doubt vast benefit of national health care costs) because of government subsidies to sport but since they do and the government has money to splash around, they could fritter it away in worse ways than subsidising some physical activity in the general population and ass-whippings of the rest of the world by Norwegian orienteers, skiers, etc.

Jon, the hat seems to fit, provided you assume that the government already solved the optimization problem correctly and is in fact benevolently optimizing the correct objective, which are also heroic assumptions. Even in the case of Norway...

I was disputing Brendan's more basic fallacious argument that
1. People active in sports have lower health care costs.
2. Many people in the US do not participate in sports.
implies that
3. Subsidizing sporting organizations will reduce health care costs significantly.

On the topic of heroism, we're certainly heroically off the original topic.

You may or may not be putting words in Brendan's mouth with points 1, 2 and 3 above. Lacking omniscience, I nevertheless think point 2 is just about indisputable and point 1 is clearly true for some sports though probably not all sports (certainly Norway is going to do better encouraging people to emulate Bjorn Daehlie's cardio-vascular fitness than anyone's ever going to manage by encouraging people to rack up knee surgeries at the rate NFL pros do). The truth value of the conclusion/3 presumably depends on the sporting organisations involved and how effective they are at getting large numbers of relatively inactive people to do significant amounts of exercise unlikely to produce serious and costly injuries.

How unfortunate that I've just penned an argument against North American governments subsidising orienteering - as Will observed, we're anything but effective at marketing our sport to large numbers of people. Not that anyone is pushing money at us and therefore standing in need of dissuasion.

In general, I don't have much good to say about subsidies. No matter how directed, the overall effect is the inefficient use of resources. But it's a moot point, because as long as there are politicians, there will be subsidies. Politicians really almost have no other reason to exist. Certainly life would be a lot less fun for them if they weren't able to bestow munificence in certain favored places.

For the moment at least, our political leaders in America have reached some degree of consensus that, interestingly, the sector of America most desperately in need of tremendous subsidization is the sector comprised of the Very Rich. Other sectors feeling more deserving will just have to wait for, ahhh-ummm--mmmm--bop!, perhaps a slight change in climate.

IF... it could be established that government subsidies to sports caused an overall health benefit to the population, and that this in turn caused a reduction in health care costs, it still wouldn't particularly argue for the US government subsidizing orienteering. They could probably get more bang for the buck by building bicycle paths and basketball courts, or encouraging walking and running, or something. Unless you wanted to go for the long-shot argument that the people most in need of exercise are pear-shaped couch potatoes who are very smart but not good at conventional sports. And that they wouldn't be interested in a sport unless it were one that they had an advantage at. So maybe you could make a really weak case that orienteering warrants a subsidy because it's especially appealing to otherwise inactive nerds. But that approach isn't going to do much for the national team people.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I enjoy your conversation (and hats). Nevertheless, 40+ years olds should not qualify for the WOC team (excluding, probably Martensson), number of competitors in MF-10 groups at the USA Champs should be more than 2, and top NA elites should not be ranked at the end of second 100 in best case. Lets do something about it in addition to just enjoying our runs in woods!

Just my 1ct. - not speaking about navigational skills, how many of NA elite athlets can run flat 10k under 32:30 or what is better under 30:20? (Sergei knows what these numbers mean - I adult and KMS qualification levels in Track&Field - kind of first steps into bigger sport). I dont think that making 18km with 790m climb (recent WOC Long distance) is possible without that level of fitness.

Top Scandinavian orienteers are in the 32 minute range for a 10K.

When you look at the Swiss juniors it is not just the money: These are runners who are 200% invested in the sport. They train very hard, not just in training camps, but on their own. Even back in seventies, when I was a junior, I would run 50-80k a week as a sixteen year old, and I was "only" top on a regional level (except once I was Swiss champ, amazing myself). Many young runners survive on little income, live in Scandinavia in summer. The courses for juniors are more demanding, a M16 on orange would be considered a joke. A three minute mistake sets you back 10 or 20 places.
The Swiss Orienteering Federation has worked extremely hard to break into the seemingly unbeatable phalanx of the Scandinavians. In the end it always up to the individual runner to get his or her act together. But there is hope: Simone Niggli-Luder is said to have abondoned her first course to check out the nice flowers along the trails. Meanwhile she got quite competitive...

It definitely is not just money - but I maintain the incentive disparity is largely exogenous - and it's not just a network effect, although that's partially it.

Orienteering thrives in Europe continentally. Admittedly, this is a thought experiment, but I assert that if Orienteering was a oddity of just one country (without the potential to propagate - which of course it did early on - the development path would have been different.

Now, I'm going a bit far afield, but I'd assert that the relative strength of Orienteering in Europe vis-a-vis the US reflects the comparative advantages of the European social/economic/cultural configuration, that while running out of gas economically (due to embedded distortions) does still have significant traction if allowed to capitalize on its unique strengths, which it has admirably in the past.

The immediate consequences of this to juniors is that Orienteering provides a social milieu - a place to have fun, to hang out, to be with peers, etc... I applaud every attempt to replicate that here - this would be great if it were possible.

Truly, Orienteering in Europe is a different animal, and as a junior it is a blast. We are unfortunately a long way from that here.

As a separate topic - has anyone wondered why adventure racing is an adult sport? Well, there are certainly some obvious, self-evident reasons. It is economically and logistically viable here (and hopefully not too much of a fad). But, there are some fundamental differences from Orienteering and the reasons that juniors aren't involved argue against it being a perfect model for O-development.

jfrederickson wrote:

"If we can make TheWaterStop the place for juniors to hang out between meets than we can keep them excited about Orienteering and turning down soccer and baseball teams for Orienteering events."

but cross-country and track teams are still acceptable.

I'm quite enjoying this thread, although I need to state again that the comments should not diminish the accomplishments of our juniors.

To div's point: lots of NA elites (for that matter lots of less than elites) can run a 32:00 10K. They just don't participate in orienteering events. If a large base of good 10K runners was all it took to have a competitive O team, we'd be a powerhouse.

To JJ's point, which I may not fully understand: Adventure racing is too long for juniors. You could put together a 1-2 hour race for them, but it would not be anything like what the current sport is. All major endurance sports have length limits for participants under 18 years old. These are well advised for a number of physiological reasons. Adventure racing generally excludes the under-18 group altogether. The bulk of elite adventure racers (US or otherwise) are between 30 and 45 years old.

To Sergey's point: why shouldn't a 40 year old be on the national team? When Joop Zootemelk won Pro Cycling Worlds at age 39, nobody claimed that there was a derth of top cyclists in the world. On the contrary, that win came at a time when the ranks were particularly well filled.

I wanna be like Sime. I am going to start picking more flowers!

I think none of NA O elites can run sub 32:00 which is just first step from junior to senior elites in T&F world as someone mentioned above.

Speaking about 40+ year olds qualifying for WOC team - I have nothing against it. Some of these die hards deserve it. Unfortunately, the depth and strength of the field during Team Trials is such that a WOC team with average age 45+ is possible. The fact of this is alarming! Where are juniors storming the team instead of old humping guys with gray hair (or even totally without :) making ways in?

arriving late to the conversation, I read somewhere in the last few months a report about Finland being sicker and lazier and fatter than Americans are now back in the 50s (or 60s?) - and the government decided to do something about it. XC skiing tracks, bicycle tracks, O-maps, clubhouses, serious sports promotion in every hamlet and village.
Result: one of the fittest nations in the world (and a high suicide rate?!). Back in Fin5 2001 days we spent a few days in the neighbourhood of Turku - local interfirm monday night race attracted over 600 participants; within a radius of 50 miles (population maybe 200K) there were 7 or 8 events a week... which continued even alongside the Fin5... subventions help.

Why aren't juniors storming the team? Hopefully John and Leif will break through shortly. But principally, it takes a long time to bbuild up the strength necessary to train seriously. If (as in my case) one only really starts running somewhat regularly aged around 21, it's bound to take time. Four or five years are probably needed to break through, so unless you get juniors out training young it ain't gonna happen. And as an adolescent it is not necessarily clear that giving up socialising to train x hours a week for a sport with next to no other juniors in a supposedly uncool sport is worthwhile.... even now...

I am with you Neal! It takes long years just to build strength and endurance to afford 10 hour or so training weeks.

Without serious investment into school orienteering programs we may not see any good USA results in foreseeable future. I am not talking about O programs for boy and girl scouts which I believe is waist of time and resources. I am speaking about long commitement with local schools and pushing O as being part of curriculum.

Eric Bone is trying to do something in that direction in Seattle. I hope he will continue for at least 5 years because it will take that long until some fruits of his effort may come to the sunlight. We need more people and resources invested in programs like this.

Sigh,

As usual, Sergey has completely missed my point. There are MANY NA runners under 32:00 for 10K. In absolute terms, I would guess that there are more here than in just about any other country (keep in mind that 32 is not a particularly impressive 10K time for a serious runner). They just aren't orienteers.

I've seen this discussion relating to several obscure sports that enjoy popularity elsewhere (you could lift this thread, almost without modification from the discussion groups of US Pro Rallying).

I'm not sure why Americans are so upset about not being the best at everything. Our top athletes do other stuff and they're pretty good at it. I have no doubt that if orienteering was a "big" sport here, we'd have a darn good team. But it's not and it probably never will be.

I have no problem with this state of affairs. I think we can provide a good venue for recreation for those who are intested at our current levels of participation. Frankly, managing an A-meet with 1000 entrants is not something I'd sign up for.

If others really want to endeavor to raise the US Team to the level of France or Britain (I think we can all agree that challenging the nordic countries is simply not realistic), go for it, but you may want to examine your motives. Is it really beneficial to pull a promising track and field athlete out of a rigorous program that could lead to a college scholarship and make an orienteer out of them? I would suggest that the positive impact to US orienteering would be outweighed by the negative impact to the individual.

Well said, ebuckley. What's wrong with just orienteering because you enjoy it? Basically the only people I can hear being vocally unhappy with the current state of affairs are Sergey and (not recently) Vladimir. I applaud Eric's work with schools, but to be honest, I applaud it not because it will lead to good results in the long term, but because kids get to try orienteering and that's fun for them right now. Who cares whether that leads anywhere?

Rather than bemoaning the lack of sub 32 minute 10K runners among the current US team, or how few of them are not dropping their regular jobs to train 20 hours a week, maybe the thing to worry about is whether those who have ambitions to do well on the world stage have the opportunity to get the coaching and training that they need. It seems to me that the very few who do have serious ambitions get exactly that, one way or another (John, Leif, Sandra, and others, for example). For the rest of us, this is an amateur, participant-focussed sport. We do it for fun. Those who feel the world will end if the US doesn't win medals at the WOC by 2015, chill out a bit, please!

Nothing wrong with doing things for fun. Should some misfits, however, get serious about those economically unproductive activities, it would be nice to have some kind of support system that would further motivate and enable achievement up to one's potential. That's all I am (not vocally) unhappy about.

The French example shows how far one can get; the French elite orienteer group does not appear to be selected from a broad population on the basis of physical ability. Rather, as I understand, they are largely orienteers' kids. I'm not saying "we" "must" recreate the French example for the sake of—who knows what, or even adapt the scenario to local realities of no government support but lots of sponsor cash floating around. I've just been pointing out the obvious—that more is possible than our best orienteers currently achieve.

And I'm not quite sure Eric Buckley's "is it really beneficial[?]" question is so rhetorical. I know several of those. They had their scholarships. There was nothing past college. Some are still running "recreationally", some aren't. Some of the ones I am thinking of had enough orienteering talent to be on the JWOC Team. Maybe they would have progressed up the ranks and travelled over the world orienteering, and had a quite different existence and worldview now. Maybe that would not have been benefical, maybe yes.

By the way, there was a name missing from the Junior Team roster at the top of this thread. Kseniya Popova has also qualified for the 2005 US JWOC Team. Unfortunately she is ineligible to compete for the US at this time (for passport reasons I think - next year?)

The full US JWOC team roster and selection rules can be found here.

My question was certainly not rhetorical. It is a legitamate question that reasonable people could disagree on. My concern is with those who don't bother to ask it at all.

Give Stanislav 50 young sub 32:00 10K male and sub 35:00 10K female runners who will be willing to invest part of their life into O and $100K travel budget each year -> in 5 or so years even scandinavians will be proud to get some medals!

Unfortunately, it is all coming to resources and motivation. Unfortunately, USOF as a whole organization is all about recreational orienteering (at least that is how orienteering is being promoted here). Orienteering as a sport is in decline in the USA :( Most troublesome is that kids are not get introduced to O as a sport and almost have no chance to participate unless they are orienteers' kids.

We, as a whole, are not doing enough to change the trend. We need professionals working 100% of time or really dedicated individuals working a lot on their spair time to reverse all this. Including all Attackpointers who are really concerned!

To Eric: I believe there are no single NA Orienteering elite runner who can make 10K under 32:00 nowdays. Even Jon T., Brian M., or Mike W.!

Just re-read my message above and looks like the major point got lost. So here it is.

Kids are our major concern! We are not doing enough to bring youngsters to the O sport.

Sergey, I don't know you, have nothing against you. From my perspective, just reading your posts, you do seem to have some time on your hands, and a strong point of view. The obvious question I would ask is, other than many many posts on AP, what are you doing to remedy this situation? You very well may be doing soemthing, I just don't know what it is.

JDW, look at the CTOC web site to see what we are trying to do with schools. Explore our results - you will notice student participation. We are small club in a small town - I just wish that bigger clubs with more resources take much more time and efforts to work seriously with kids. I personally go from school to school and try to introduce orienteering as a sport. We need to work with kids more - they are the future of O sport here.

It takes a lot of work and dedication. I always remember about "one from ten" rule: 1 from 10 whom you introduced to sport will stay for more than 2 times, from that 1 from 10 will stay for more than 1 year, from that 1 from 10 will reach any sport results. So you need 1000 kids to get one who will reach a certain level of profeciency and 10 who will consider O as being part of their life.

I hope that I will be able to help at least couple kids to come to this sport who may bring four more and so on. I think we all should put similar goal in front of us in addition to just enjoying our time in woods, training hard, and competing. We need to reverse declining or in best case stagnated state of orienteering in this country. My former T&F coach used to say "Stop talking, start working!" :)

Sorry if I may offended someone. I know that there are many people who are working hard on supporting and promoting orienteering in the USA. I just wish that all others would take more active role. All for now - need to work (finally) :)

I wasn't too offended myself. It seems to me we do need to work to build the ranks. We all know that big events and o-clubs are few and far between. Mostly because there aren't that many competitve orienteers to organize them. Wether or not we have super elite athletes, it would sure be nice to have a larger community of people like attack point users. Those who can make maps, train clubs and run quality events.

I happened upon this rather humerous article today. Perhaps the first thing we can do is take it's advice and look cool. Do Extreme O suits count???

O Suits