Military World Championships

[Simon E]

The World Military Orienteering Championships is about to start Croatia. Men's middle race start list could be argued to be even stronger than at the World Championships, since most of the big names are in there, but the field is 170 runners rather than 45 and countries seem to have up to seven runners. Pick your top three from Gueorgiou, Hubmann, Schneider, Efimov, Novikov, Khramov, Karner, Sirmais and a whole host of other WOC runners.

Does anybody know why Great Britain don't have a team?

[Gross]

GB & USA are not members of CISM... Military Sports body... goes back to Cold War days I believe

[Mr timE]

Gross is correct that the British Army has never competed in these championships, historically it was linked to the Warsaw Pact using it as political tool, however, that has not been an issue recently and we have tried since 1991, but the British Army being a professional force does not have conscription, which most of the other Armies do, therefore they are able to call upon much larger numbers including many of their top national team athletes, some of whom serve their 2 yrs doing nothing but sports, an alternative to lottery funding you could say.
Last year BAOC tried to get permission to send the Army team to Brazil for CISM orienteering as we had the funding, even though we would not be amongst the top teams, but we were turned down because CISM would not accept just us orienteers, the British Army would have had to agree to take part in the majority of the other CISM sports which are numerous and varied, including shinning up masts and also a mini version of the Olympics! The BA does not have the funds to commit to all of the CISM sports, things such as body Armour, & bomb proof vehicles quite rightly take precedence at the moment.