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Polish Championships Beaten by Fire Risk

Rob Howard / 25.07.2006

The organisers of the Polish Championships, due to be taking place now, have been forced to call off this year’s race due to hot weather and tinder dry forest conditions affecting central Europe.

In a statement Race Director Pawel F¹ferek said:
“When you organize an adventure race you have to take many obstacles into consideration. Most of them you can overcome with partners help and with your own commitment, but there are some obstacles which no organizer can beat.
When we set the Adventure Racing Poland Championships for summer time we had one aim – to prepare interesting routes, where teams could compete in many diverse disciplines. Unfortunately this year’s summer happened to be very hot presenting a huge danger for the forests on the course.

For several weeks we observed the weather forecast and humidity announcements. Day after day the situation was more and more disturbing. In this week the forest bed humidity was lower than 5% - which is less than in a piece of paper! In this particular situation even a very small spark can start a serious fire.

State Forest management was forced to ban entering the forest and announce the highest degree of fire danger. As a result, if we wanted to run the race we would have to make large changes to the planned routes and significant sections would have had to be run on asphalt roads.

That was the reason we decided to call off the championships planned for July 24-30.

This was a very difficult decision to make but in this particular situation the decision seems to be right because we want the championships to be on a very high level.

In few days time we will announce new time for Adventure Racing Poland Championships. It will probably be second half of the October 2006. “