The European Orienteering Championships finished with the Individual Sprint

Sunday saw the final day of the European Orienteering Championships in Neuchatel, Place-des-Halles, Switerland.
This was the Individual Sprint, orienteering in an urban area.

The sprint race on Sunday proved to be exciting again at the European Championships in Orienteering. As on Saturday, the weather conditions created a more autumnal than spring-like atmosphere.

In the women’s race GB was represented by Jo Shepherd and Megan Carter-Davies. After progressing through to the Semi Finals in the Knock-out Sprint on Saturday (15 May), Megan put in another strong performance in wet and slippery conditions to finish 17th overall.

Megan comments:  "In the Individual Sprint I think I navigated reasonably well, but I felt maybe I should have committed to running and cornering faster and also lost time on some routes. I definitely have some things to take away and learn from."

Jo Shepherd finished 70th, with Tove Alexandersson claiming her 2nd gold of the Championships after winning the Knock-out Sprint yesterday.

Behind Alexandersson, the Swiss Simona Aebersold and Alena Roos ran for silver and bronze. They only lost by 5, respectively 6 seconds to the winner and this with a running time of around 16 minutes on 4 kilometres and 21 controls.

In the men’s, making his senior debut was GB Thomas Wilson finishing 110th position with Emil Svensk (Sweden) taking gold and Yannick Michels (Belgium), one of the favourites for a medal taking silver.

Emil Svensk won the 4.4 km long sprint race with 80 m of climb and 25 checkpoints. With his time of 16:06 minutes he was winning 13 seconds ahead of Yannick Michiels (BEL) and 22 seconds ahead of Kasper Fosser (NOR) and Gustav Bergmann who completed the podium in third place with the same time.

Afterwards Tom said: "This was my first big senior international call-up, it was definitely a very enjoyable and interesting experience. Even up until around two months ago I had no expectations to be here, so I feel very lucky running hard and trying to make the most of the experience.

Due to my unexpected and last-minute selection, my preparation mostly consisted of trying to do a good number of sprint course in and around Barcelona to try and get myself back into some tricky map reading and route choices whilst running fast.

I felt pretty happy with my Knock-out Qualification run and although I was still a way off advancing to the later round, I am pretty pleased with my performance and certainly enjoyed it a lot."

Megan commented: "It was great to compete internationally again and I’m really glad I could make it here. It was exciting, especially standing on the start line of the Semi-Final of the Knock-out Sprint again.

Personally, I had a good race in the Qualification and was happy to qualify in 4th for the Knock-out Sprints.

I had an interesting Quarter Final.  I made a mistake at the start and really had to race hard to catch the top three and qualify for the Semi Final. Thankfully I managed this! In the Semi Final I took some bad route choices in the first half however I was still in the mix coming into the spectator control, but then my SI card’s ‘air’ mode unfortunately switched off, it ran out of battery, and after that I wasn’t able to catch the other girls."

Jo Shepherd, said:  "It was great to be back at an international competition and I feel really fortunate that I was able to attend. The Knock-out Sprint qualification was really fun and I followed my race plan well. After four months of injury, partial rupture of a tendon attachment at my knee, and very little running this winter I was happy to be within 90s of my heat winner Simona Aebersold in my first race of the season, even if it wasn’t good enough to qualify in a stacked field. I didn’t find the same flow in the individual Sprint but overall it’s been valuable to experience racing internationally under the covid protocols and has cleared a lot of the unknowns and apprehensions ahead of the World Orienteering Championships."

Official Results from yesterday's Individual Sprints can be found here.

Watch the Prize-Giving ceremony of the Indivual Sprint here.