Letter from Sini Kemppainen, the second place in D21E!

Hello !

Thanks for asking our opinion. This will be my letter, most of my thoughts, but as you can guess, I have heard others comments too.

We heard about this competition from one of our club's member, who has been there earlier. Then I found the internet-pages of the competition in english, and I keep them very important, because we did the decision about participating to the competition after reading the internetpages and looking for the photographs from the latest years. Also I have some very good memories from orienteering in Czech Republic earlier. And orienteering in the beginning of April in Finland is not easy, because of cold and snow, so we had decided to go south in Easter. That is a good point to attract finnish orienteers.

In my opinion whole the competitions were very successful. All the important things worked, like controls were in right places, maps were accurate, starts worked, SI's were good, results came quickly after coming to finish, there were showers, 'cafeteria' to get some drinks and small things to eat, orienteering courses were challenging enough. Also our accommodation was much better than we hoped beforehand, so we could sleep and eat and wash there and be fresh after hard competitions.

What could be better, was advertising and telling the situation in competition (I don't know the word, but i mean telling via loudspeekers in the finish). More times and who are leading in which class, in czech (we can hear the names and understand some classes, sometimes) and in english too.

My friends didn't drink the refresments among the competitions in drinking controls and after competition, because they were afraid of microbes or whatever. They would drink it, if the water would be bottled. I drunk it and I didn't have any problems with it. But they were happy that they had own drinks in finish, so that wasn't a big problem.

Also two things are different in Finland: when we have shortened race race, the winners time is about 40-45 minutes. Maybe we were not so good in Easter, but we were quite long time in the forest at first day. Other is that we have more signs in the roads before competitions, that it will be easier to find the central competition place. If we haven't had maps from earlier trips in Czech Republic, I think we would have much problems to find there... Those little village names were not in the bigger maps.

In every case we were very satisfied that we came to Prague Easter.

Sini