SKI JWOC 2007 Blog

3 days to go - the ski-JWOC07 Salzburg is ready!

Salzburg, Austria.- 3 days to go, and the OK-team of the SKI JWOC - EYOC 2007 is ready for the race. Around 200 young European and Asian orienteers from 19 nations are looking forward to a speedy sprint, a highly technical middle distance, a powerful long distance and an exciting relay with high tension until the end – the spectators close to the race at the open air arena.

ASKÖ HENNDORF ORIENTEERING, one of Austrias most profiled orienteering event organizers, did whatever was possible in those weeks without snow and with much storm, to make this event come true. The most important question was: Will there be enough of the white gold? During the last week half a metre of snow has fallen on the Postalm (the relay and long-distance area). But unfortunately there is no snow in Faistenau and Abtenau, where Sprint and Middle should have taken place. Therefore the new area for those competitions will be – as announced a few days ago – Sportgastein.

Here’s what course setter Wolfgang Pötsch is saying about this new situation: “Our three map surveyors Martin Lejsek, Roman Horky and Daniel Lebar finished drawing the map yesterday, and JWOC director Mr. Christian Breitschädel and myself have checked out the infrastructure there over the past two days. The area is mostly open, with some gentle hills – a little romantic valley at 1700 m altitude. The mountains surrounding this valley are very impressive and high, it’s a real paradise when there is sunny weather. The new courses have been planned and we will start preparing the tracks with snow cats and scooters on Thursday. There is already a dense system with many broad and fast tracks, so making and finalising the courses should be done in less than a day.”

On the Postalm the organizers have been preparing the tracks for the last two days, but are unfortunately facing some other problems. On one hand there is enough snow, especially in the forest, on the other hand, however, the storm has blown away much of the snow on the higher, open parts of the Postalm. Another problem was caused by hurricane “Kyrill” in January. Some of the planned tracks have had to be cancelled because of storm damage (i.e. trees lying over the track) – many trees have been broken, or completely blown over and this has made the tracks impassable. So the course setting had to be modified, and competitors sould be warned: a short cut through the forest might be a dead end street.

“Problems are there to be solved”, says Christian Breitschädel, “we made everything possible to secure a WM worthy event and I’m glad to say: that worked. So now we are only looking forward to welcome the teams in our beautiful country!”

Photos: (High Resolution on request or for downloading at http://www.ski-jwoc2007.eu/ under the link “photos”)