Discussion: it's a small world after all...

today's Oringen news has an interesting blurb about Bernt Frilén, the superstar in the 70s. looks like the male super-elites today ran the exact same course as in the 70s, got to see the course a priori, and still couldn't beat him.
http://www.oringen.com/t26.asp?p=137511&x=1&a=4361...
on a personal note, when I attended Oringen in 2004, I got a chance to visit some distant relatives in Marks Kommun. The farm where my great-great-grandmother Kronbeck was born is now owned by the Frilén brothers. what are the odds...
I should write him a letter and invite him TJOC next year.

mlewis
ntoa

No mention of whether the conditions make the comparison valid. Besides the weather, which is always a variable, 31 years of forest growth and/or logging could make the area significantly faster or slower than it was in 1975. I could find places in the northeast US where times from back then would be completely unbeatable now due to advancing undergrowth. No idea what the situation may be in Sweden.

Hard to tell, but Simone was faster than the women's winner then.

Simone is like "my super ex-girlfriend". She has special powers.

I would expect the best women of today, under similar conditions, to show more of an increase compared to the women of 1975 than I would for the corresponding men. There's likely been more of an advance in women's orienteering (as well as many other sports) than men's over that time period. If conditions were similar, I'd expect Sime to be well ahead of the 1975 women's winning time.

You're probably right. Simone was ~6.5% better than the old time and 5 other women (out of 18 finishers in the class) also beat it.

Changing conditions definitely have an influence. Rob Walter ran the 1985 World Championships course in 2001 (which we used to try to set appropriate winning times for the 2002 WMOC finals) and did 110 with a decent run. The 1985 World Championships themselves were won in 88 or thereabouts, and I'd have expected Rob on home ground to have gone at least sub-100 (and probably sub-95) under uniform conditions. Kooyoora is well known to have become significantly thicker since 1985.

But the question remains: did he carry beer with him this time around?

They interviewed Bernt after the event, and he was gracious and said he ran the course in October, and did not have two races on the days previous. On the other hand, this year's runners saw the course (on the old map) in advance. The men's winner (Kharmov) was about 50 seconds slower than Bernt's 1975 run.