Orienteering and the Olympics

I read with interest your editorial (in TIO 81) regarding the Olympics and orienteering. It could, I believe, be very benefitial to orienteering but frankly I am apalled at the suggestion of the Olympic comittee that competitors should be allowed to study the course in advance.

It's easy to see where they would get the idea from as they probably see it as removing an area of what might seem like luck from the competition. The problem is that it completely misses the point of orienteering which is the skill of solving navigational problems on the run and which requires the orienteer to combine that special blend of concentration, judgment and planning as well as coping with the physical problem of actually traversing the terrain.

If we remove everything but the physical problem of traversing the terrain by allowing the competitors to see the course in advance we will turn orienteering from a unique sport to just another form of cross country running. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with cross country running but it's not orienteering. If such a situation were allowed to develop we could envisage competitors at the higher levels with whole teams of course planning specialists pouring over the maps to work out the best routes. Is this orienteering? I think not.

It is true that the the competitor still has to execute the planned route but the skill of navigating on the move will have been lost and what were are left with would be little more than a 'foot rally'. 'Run on a bearing of 125 deg. for 100 double paces and then follow the base of the large knoll to the right until the base of the first re-entrant etc.' Orienteering has always been attractive to me because it combines physical effort with thinking on the run. The best orienteer is not necessarily the best runner but the fastest navigator and that's the crucial difference. Any move to subvert the nature of our sport for the sake of increased coverage say in the Olympics is a move which should be strenuously resisted by all orienteers.

There will further challenges to the nature of our sport in the future. The advent of modern GPS technology while laudible and useful in other situations is one which may soon have an impact on orienteering. Image an orienteer carrying a GPS capable of pintpointing his location to within 10m on a map overlayed with a grid. Is this orienteering? I don't think so.

Anyone reading this who is saying it will never happen is blind to the progress of modern technology. The technology to do this is here NOW. It may not be cheap enough or widely available enough at present but it's only a matter of time before GPS technology is available for less than £100. Once this happens we will be forced to consider these matters. Instead of waiting until the issue is forced by a competitor using such a system we should debate the issues now and develop policies for dealing with them.

Paul Smyth