ifititches wrote:Danailov, watching the website for the results on Saturday, I had a look at the photos of the organisers. Looked like it was "youth" games in terms of lots of young people organising too. Does that reflect the age profile of the sport in Bulgaria, and what do you think makes it so popular with younger people? (if it is)
ifititches - I think you got Czech Republic (where EYOC was) and Bulgaria (where Danailov is from) mixed up. The young people helping with EYOC organisation will have been Czechs.
As to whether this reflects the age profile of orienteering in the Czech Republic...there are certainly a lot more young people who orienteer (both juniors and the 21's - at multiday events you often have M/W21 E, A, B, C in order to accommodate them all).
As to why -
- partly probably because the orienteers are much more concentrated (higher proportion of the population) so you have a club in many towns (even smaller ones), making it earier to arrange training sessions, social life etc. For eg. in Novy Bor there is an O notice board in town which publicises OK Jiskra Novy Bor's activities/results, next to other town clubs, eg. table tennis, volleyball and so on.
- partly (possibly) because working with children is not surrounded by loads of red tape as it is here. Some Czech O clubs' web-pages have summer camps (these tend to be very common in the Czech Republic) for their juniors, probably aged anything between 8-15-ish. The thing about these is that they're not just orienteering - lots of other activities too but it allows the kids to get into orienteering gradually. The problem with doing something like this in the UK would be a) that there are not enough juniors in one club to make a one-club venture feasible, b) the summer holidays are shorter (in CZ they are all of July and August, although there are hardly any holidays throughout the school year), c) there would be soooo much red tape in the way in the UK.
Danailov wrote:And about the live results - didn't you find it boring to wait 3 hours until the 1st results from the classic... on the relay there weren't live results at all ...
From the EYOC website, I get the impression that the organisers tried their best to get live results up but at times their efforts were unfortunately marred by problems with technology:
EYOC 2005 website wrote:Thank you all very much for coming, you have made a great o-event!
We would like to apologise everyone for our troubles with getting the results on the web in time. We have tried hard but the internet connection sometimes had a mind of its own . So, sorry again, we believe that everything should be OK by now.
We have prepared a downloadable pack of all results and split times, which you can download here.
Also a map pack is in preparation and should be published as soon as possible.
