7 Cerros Medellin Adventure Race
Navigational errors affect leading teams
Jacqueline Windh / 14.10.2006
Back at the mountain bike section, both going up the hill and then heading down, we had seen FINLAND going strong, with INTER SPORT (FRA) and BOSI (COL) chasing them hard, but unable to lose one another.
From the hill, racers cruised back down into the city, heading straight for the chaos of downtown MedellÃn, to the next transition at MedellÃn's city hall at Plaza Alpujarras. From here, they set out on the orienteering section, navigating through the city streets with a series of questions about specific locations to answer and turn into the next CP.
The navigation took them to an impressive cathedral built of more than one million individual red bricks, the BasÃlica Metropolitana. INTER SPORT left the PC here only two minutes behind FINLAND, but BOSI was nowhere in sight. In fact, we didn't see BOSI at the CP for another 50 minutes – they yelled out something about bad instructions from a course official as they ran past. In the meantime, Sweden and Spain and several Colombian teams had already been through.
The Spaniards looked strong and confident, but HALTI's Mikael seemed to be hurting. He even hooked up to Frida (champion runner and looking fresh as anything) for a tow for the run out of town and heading up to the next hill.
SOLE (USA) were five minutes behind BOSI. Paul had a big grin on his face. Even though they'd had more navigational challenges, he said "It was great, a great city tour, lots of shopping, nice people..."
The order of teams that I saw pass through here (unoffical list, I am probably missing some) is: FINLAND, INTER SPORT, SAFETY (COL), ABARTH-TEVA (ESP), HALTI, CORRE CAMINOS (COL), CAR FRANCO (COL), BOSI
This was also the end point for the individual competition in orienteering, and it was really great to see so many little kids out there learning how to navigate! The local participation in this race is just great. The huge participation in the hill running category is an indication of the level of interest there is in sports, even from people who could never afford equipment like a bike or skates.
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