[Which other sports are you thinking of?
Fell running? Cross-country? Whilst a lot of road races are expensive, a lot are cheap too.
However, looking at the full range of running based events, orienteering does on the whole look, to me at least, to be good value, particularly given the costs involved. I am concerned about the costs - it seems that more and more sport is becoming open only to the affluent - but a lot of that is not the fault of organisers. They are certainly not ripping people off, far from it. In relative terms, it strikes me that orienteering is doing well, but we shouldn't be complacent just because some sport is at a stupid price.
Over the next 8 weeks, if I compete every Sunday, the total cost of my entries would be £59, that is less than £7.50 per week. That only includes the Sunday event, and only includes one district event. That is good and bad: good that the cost is relatively low, bad in that the calendar seems saturated with regional events which only provide limited competition, and that there could be more local, cheaper and better competition if the regional events didn't block everything else going on (I don't include enjoyable but non-competitive informal events). To maintain that weekly competition, includes at least half those weekends where there is nothing within a 50-mile radius (I know that for some this is still 'local', but we're talking about centre of England, high population density, etc etc). It looks even more sparse after Easter. That's the real problem - not the cost of entries, but the cost of travel both in time, money and energy. So we won't be orienteering every weekend, probably not more than half those weekends. That might be a good thing, but at a time when there are complaints about fixtures congestion, it does seem a bit ironic that, if anything, we feel short of the sort of events we're looking for rather than overloaded, which may therefore be a bit indicative of some of the issues facing orienteering.
