Adventure Racing World Championship 2006
A Course to be Proud Of
Rob Howard / 23.08.2006
There has been universal praise for the 2006 World Championship course, set by Mikael Nordstrom, with many of the competitors rating it as the best they have ever done.I asked Nordstrom how he had designed the course, and what he’d set out to achieve.
“We knew we had the World Championships last spring and set about looking for a venue, and we looked all over Sweden. Then we thought about Hemavan being close to the glaciers and fjords of Norway and they were very positive, as was the Arctic Circle region of Norway. The Sami people too were welcoming to us, and there were really no restrictions on where we could go. So we had our venue.�
“The next stage was to begin the research and I did so much research on places to go from the internet and books. I picked some places I really wanted to go, The two glaciers and the 7 Sisters were high on the list. I also wanted to do some rafting but that never worked out.�
“Then I had to get out and meet people around these places and I was scouting for days at a time. Sometimes after a few days I would decide the area was too boring or too difficult. Then I had one day over the whole area in a helicopter to get a good concept of the course. I think it is irresponsible not to do this on a big expedition course. You have to get a real idea of the land. We scouted on boats up the coast too.�
“We had to use helicopters to get ropes stages in place as well. On the Okstindan glacier alone we used 600m of rope, another 600m of tape and over 1000 poles to mark the route.�See All Event Posts
