Nopesport

Last Sunday saw clubs around the country competing for the prestige of a spot in the Compass Sport Cup Final later this year. The SW was no exception, as Quantock Orienteers hosted a keenly contested round in the hills that are their namesake.

For those of you from up north who've not been to the Quantocks, put you're 'southern softie' jibes on the back burner for a while. This is tough orienteering - steep, slippy valleys, mixed runnability and multiple point feature control sites, making misses costly in terms of time/height loss. The terrain makes course planning a challenge and this was reflected in the large amounts of climb - 410m over 8.4km on the brown course.

In freezing temperatures, the polar bears of SW orienteering, BOK, eased through as expected but were perhaps pushed closer than they thought they would be by comparative teddy bears WIM and NGOC. The trophy was tightly fought, with the determination of SARUM's juniors seeing off the border crossing force of SWOC by a mere 27 points. Exceptional individual performances came from BOK's incredible Clive Hallet, posting 58mins on a tough brown course. Will he ever get slower? Veteran Alice Bedwell saw off the threat of GB Junior Squaddie Ruth Holmes on the Ladies Blue, while NGOC's Joe Taunton won the light green by a whopping 8 mins. Finally BOK's Gavin Clegg saw off 90 other runners on the mens blue to claim a narrow victory.

Results on the day were affected by some problems with the JoeLee e-punching system, however QO coped well to deal with such large numbers of competitors.

Club Results:

CSC
BOK 2409
WIM 2223
NGOC 2145
DEVON 1781

CST
SARUM 1280
SWOC 1253
KERNO 1193
SLOG 1100
WSX 1077

Results

Bendover.