The King of our Sport

Matt Ogden, July 2017

Quite often the case in sport, it is the ones at the very top that inspire us and keep us hooked on the sport. For me, and for so many in the orienteering world, there has been one champion who has  for so long strived to be the best and in doing so has taught the sport how to truly navigate. The flying Frenchman, Thierry Gueorgiou ran his last World Championship race in Estonia recently and collected his 14th Gold Medal – an unparalleled achievement in men’s orienteering. 

Thierry has been particularly influential in my development as an orienteer, especially my focus on the technical aspect of the sport. From an early age I realised that near perfect navigaton was essential for a strong performance, so began the insistent desire to improve my ability to read the map. Thierry is known for making famous the ”Full-speed, no mistakes” style of orienteering which I have spoken about in a previous coaching corner. Basically, it involves finding the most obvious features in the terrain and utilising them as much as possible when orienteering.

I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Thierry when I lived in Uppsala, the highlight being when he followed me for a training. Thierry is quite fond of New Zealand, an avid Rugby fan, he very kindly prepared the video below for one of our National Junior Training Camps. To quote his final remarks as a World Championship competitive orienteer – ”Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened”. Thank you Thierry for your time at the top and all that we have learnt from you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBG_j2VTY7I

For more desktop technical training and viewing of the latest international races (such as Thierry’s route from his gold-medal winning race) head over to the link below for some GPS tracking.
http://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/

And with perfect synchronicity, while not aware of the content of Matt's Coaching Corner article this newsletter, thanks to Gordon Holmes for finding this article - “Some thoughts on Orienteering Technique from the great French Orienteer”. 
https://gallery.mailchimp.com/d340cc248a147946e62fc17c3/files/CoachConrerTGOrienteeringTechnique.pdf

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