Welcome!

Welcome to the webpages of the Oxford University Orienteering Club.

Orienteering is a sport which provides different things for different people. For some, it is merely about the opportunity to escape from the city and run in natural environments they'd never otherwise visit. For others, it is about the challenge of finishing a course using fine navigation techniques. Finally, it is also an extremely competitive sport which requires its elites to maintain an extremely high level of physical performance.

At Oxford, orienteering is a Blues sport which provides an opportunity for its members to orienteer for whatever reason they choose. The club supports a range of abilities and always welcomes beginners: roughly half of our members took up the sport at Oxford whilst some had made the GB squad before they arrived! The most effective way for an orienteer to improve is through gaining experience in the forest, which the club facilitates by taking a minibus to an event each weekend.

We had some great performances this weekend at the British Orienteering Championships, culminating in a fantastic win for the OUOC team of Ben Stevens, Jamie Parkinson and Peter Hodkinson on the Men's Premier Relay. The first time OUOC has won in 34 years.

Ben Stevens ran a strong first leg coming in third on the slightly longer gaffle with a time of 38:51 only 39 seconds behind the leader. Alan Cherry was also running first leg for Interløpers, the favourites to win, but in an attempt to make up for a small error on the first control he followed a group into a parallel feature and mispunched at the third control - bad luck Alan. This left the field fairly open and OUOC in with a good chance of winning. Jamie put in a great performance on the second leg to come back in the lead 15 seconds in front of the next rival NOC in a time of 39:19. The final leg was ran by Peter, fresh from a dodge-ball tournament the day before, who put in another top run to finish 3 minutes ahead of second place rivals ShUOC, finishing in a time of 33:45 on a slightly shorter gaffle and with the fastest individual time on the men's premier relay.

On the Saturday there were some good performance in the individual championships too. On the M21 Elite course Ben Stevens came 7th in a time of 106:20 and Alan Cherry was only 21 seconds behind in 8th. Ben Crompton also did well coming 15th on the Long Difficult course. Full results from the weekend can be found here

Congratulations to Wadham who retained their title, edging Exeter by 16 seconds in a repeat of last year's close contest. In third place were Wadham's second team, who just beat Somerville by 1 second. Alan Cherry (Exeter) was the fastest round the course in 17:04, whilst Kath Nicholls (New) was the quickest lady in 25:06.

Full Results
Splits
Graphical Splits Analysis
Routegadget - Draw the routes you took!

23-24 February saw the BUCS orienteering competition near Sheffield, which consists of an individual race and a relay race.

On Saturday, Peter Hodkinson, 3rd year at St Anne's, won the men's individual competition at Burbage Moor. This involved 63 minutes of hard running in light snow through tough heather and marshes and some tricky navigation though boulder fields and clumps of dense woodland to bring him home nearly 2 minutes ahead of 2nd place.

On Sunday, our team of Ben Stevens - Merton, Alan Cherry - Exeter, and Peter Hodkinson - St Anne's, won the men's relay competition at Greno Woods. It was a very close race and despite each runner being out in a wood for about 30 minutes doing slightly different courses, there were only seconds in it at the finish, with Peter just managing to outrun Sheffield's last leg runner on the final hill.

This is the first time in years that anyone other than Edinburgh or Sheffield has won the men's relay or had a men's individual winner. Unfortunately we were unable to field a full women's team (of three), so we only managed to come 5th overall (men's and women's results are combined). Hopefully we can improve on this next year though!





The Oxford City race, organised by OUOC, took place on Saturday, 20th October.
Results and Planner's Comments are now availiable on the City Race page