SA National Orienteering Squad: At WOC's end

We've just had the last 2 days of WOC '07 fly past us. The Relay took place on Saturday whilst the Sprint Final was on Sunday.

Relay

The relay took place in and near the grounds of a cultural heritage park showcasing rural Ukrainian lifestyles. The area was dominated by various windmills.

The South African team had a poor performance, placing only 36th out of 39 starting teams. This is down on the 33rd the team achieved last year. Team Member Nicholas Mulder started off well for the team, but made two successive errors around the 10th control. He was able to recatch Tapei and Ireland, but the team still found themselves some 7 - 10 minutes adrift of their ideal placing.

Team Member Richard Lange took over the baton and improved the teams ranking from 35th after Leg 1 to 33rd after Leg 2. He was however, also unsatisfied with his run, loosing between 3 and 6 minutes en route. Anchor leg runner for South Africa was Team Member Jeremy Green, who also made approximately 10 minutes of mistakes. In the end, the team finished ahead of Hong Kong as well as the disqualified teams of Slovakia and Taipei.

At the front end of the field, Team Finland comfortably won the Women's Relay whilst Team Russia won the Men. The Swiss Team, who performed well in both categories, found themselves a new mascot. He's even got an accreditation pass! His name is Boris.

Sprint Final

The Sprint was held in superb terrain in and around Kiev's Botanical Gardens. There were no big surprises with Simone Niggli (Switzerland) taking the Women's and Thierry Gueorgiou (France) taking the Men's titles. This is now their 12th and 5th WOC golds respectively.

The Ups and Downs of Kiev

We've now spent almost 2 weeks in the Ukraine. We're only now feeling that we're coming to grips with the language, the writing, the people and the culture. We can now sort of read Cyrillic (it's actually easy as it's quite phonetic). We now know where to find the better restaurants, bars, shopping centres. We've can now pick up certain words in the Ukrainian, such as those telling us which subway station we are now at. And finally, we've learnt to look left first before crossing roads.

Kiev has a lot going for it and a lot going against it. Here are some of our more interesting observations:

The vehicle traffic is so bad it's fascinating. The big roads tend to have 8 lanes, 4 going each direction. However, when traffic backs up, almost all Ukrainians have no problem ramping up the kerb and driving on the pavement, the side road, the grass in-between and even in the lane of the oncoming traffic. Rule #1 as a pedestrian... ALWAYS keep an eye out for traffic when walking down a pavement.

The public transport system is dirt cheap... and yet highly reliable.

The city is obsessed with War memorials.

Ukrainian cereal tastes like cardboard. Ukrainian bread is even worse.

The people of the city definitely know how to party. It helps that beer is dirt cheap... and very good. It is even served and drunk on street corners!

Thanks to everyone for your support and comments on this blog. Despite early reservations, we've really enjoyed the competitions here at WOC. Here's a photo of the relay team after the finish. Hope you'll follow the team again in 2008 in Olomouc, Czech Republic.