JWOC 2024: a view from GB Coach Tom Bray

I am very proud of our JWOC team this year.

Before discussing our results, there were many things that went well for us this year that are even more important which I list below:

The engagement of our athletes is unparalleled 

Many of the JWOC team are engaged to learn as athletes: they are engaged with the British Orienteering L4 Development squad programme, they have personal coaches, and they maximise the support they get from their universities. I notice that the athletes that trained the smartest over the winter improved the most.

Images below: Imogen Pieters in the JWOC Relay Race (Credit: Peter Hap) and Euan Tryner in the Sprint Relay Race (Credit: Vratislav Polívka).

'Pre-camps' are important!

We had two pre-camps to Czechia in October 2023 and May 2024, which gave most athletes at least one opportunity to train in relevant terrain. This gave them the chance to familiarise themselves with it ahead of the competition. 

We did our homework

As a team, we had many classroom sessions to pick out, and individualise, the lessons we’d learn at the pre-camps. Athletes took ownership for their own learning, discussing navigational tactics, making maps, planning courses, and helping each other.

Support from coaches

We had wonderful and supportive volunteer coaches. They were: Paul Taylor, Tamsin Moran and Pete Tryner, and they were fundamental in keeping our athletes spirits high throughout the competition!

Results from this year's JWOC

My job is to progress our athletes. I’m aiming for personal bests (PBs), where athletes are improving year-on-year compared to their previous JWOCs. Results for 2024 were:

• Relay results are shown as position on that individual leg.
• Green highlight is top-30
• Border is a PB for athletes that have run in previous JWOCs.
• The result for Imogen Pieters is in the MSR, as she completed the course, but had an SI timing chip failure

To achieve a top-30 result (in fields of 155-175 athletes) is impressive at JWOC, and those results are hard earnt. There were many notable results from the championships: Immy Pieters with top-20s and Euan Tryner with top-30s in all disciplines, and two impressive relay runs from James Hammond fresh off the back of a silver medal in the Long at EYOC only a week before.

I am very proud of all our athletes: everyone returning to JWOC set PBs, and all our new JWOC athletes set good baselines for next year. There were many good individual goals reached, such as overcoming injuries to make the start-line, or setting a game-plan about how to navigate and then executing it cleanly.

The results don’t show just how good the technical performances were of all the GBR athletes; our young team may not be as physically quick yet against all of our rivals (the only classes at JWOC are M/W20, so many of our athletes were running against competitors up to 4 years older than they were), but I am very happy with our performances.

We applied the lessons we learnt in our preparation, and maximised what we could do on the day. There was a lot of fantastic navigation from all in the GBR team, and a lot of professionalism in how we raced.

Personally, it is satisfying to see enthusiastic young adults having fun with their racing and learning how to be better athletes. Onwards to next year!

Image below: Full team photo taken at JWOC 2024.