Almost 30 New Zealanders will soon travel to the Czech Republic to contest the 10th World Rogaine Championship event, being held on 31 August / 1 September.
Current world rogaine champions, Christchurch's Chris Forne and Marcel Hagener, are scheduled to compete in an international adventure race in China on the same date so are unable to defend their title in the Republic. However, the long-standing super-veteran team of Bill and Anne Kennedy and Peter Squires, also from Christchurch, will not be missing out. This team has been represented at every previous world championship. Their only break in holding the world super-veteran title (age 55 upwards) since 2002 was in 2010 when they took a breather to help organise the event, held in New Zealand.
A young Kiwi in contention is Christchurch's Tim Farrant, winner of mixed juniors at the world champs in Estonia in 2008 and 1st in the mens open in last year's Australian champs. Farrant is teamed this time with Jeremy Wilson, also of Christchurch, in the open grade.
Estonia-based Lauri Leppik, Technical Manager for the International Rogaining Federation, rates hot teams from New Zealand, Russia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Czech Republic and the Ukraine who could become winners.
Rogaining is an endurance sport in which small teams travel on foot across varied and largely untracked terrain. Teams navigate their way around a network of check points placed at landscape features using a topographical map and compass. Each check point has a known score value. Teams plan their own route from a pre-marked map to visit as many check points as they can to secure the maximum-points score in the time available.
A championship rogaine extends over 24 hours so that the teams are out navigating through the night as well as during daylight hours. Though dates for an event are set to align with a good moon, cloud cover offers no guarantee of lunar light to navigate by.
The 2012 championship is being held in the Ore Mountains 150 km north-west of the capital city Prague, near the Republic's border with Germany – the course extends across the national border so that participants must carry passports amongst their race gear. Not so long ago troubled by tanks and political unrest, since the Velvet Revolution in 1989, these mountains have offered peaceful wilderness of rolling hills clothed in mixed forest and grassland. The area is popular for skiing, cycling and hiking and there are numerous spas fed by thermal springs.
750 starters from 28 counties have registered for this event. If you take out the strong eastern European contingents, and Finland, NZ has the second-highest attendance, interestingly just a few behind Australia.
Rogaining started in Australia in the 1970s, and jumped across the Tasman into New Zealand in the early 1990s. More recently it has become very popular in eastern European countries including Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Czech Republic, and Estonia.
World championship events are held each two years. New Zealand hosted the event in 2010 centred around Cheviot in North Canterbury, and extending over more than 60 local hill country grazing farms. The 550 participants at Cheviot came from 23 different countries.
