Flanders vs Walloon region

As most of you already know Belgium is mainly divided into 2 regions.

Flanders is the region where people speak Dutch. This area is located in the north part of Belgium. Orienteering maps in this region are most of the time flat, good runnability. Typical for this region are small dunes, heath. Map drawers have the tendency to draw very much into details.

There are 5 orienteering clubs in this region. And they do a very good job in organising events every sunday. In wintertime there is a nightevent on most of the fridays and the army organises a big number of events on fridaymorning. In spring you have a sprintrace on almost every wednesday. You find the calendar here . I don't think there are many areas in the world where you can do a competition every weekend during the whole year, but flanders is one of them.

Clubtrainings however are not popular. None of the clubs has a clubhouse like in scandinavia. Only few trainings are organised, and there is probably a lack of interest because of all the competitions .

map example picked from a site of one of the Catching Features runners in the world and one of the most talented juniors of Flanders: Jeremy Genar:

In the Walloon region people speak French.

Orienteering possibilities are more or less the same. Every sunday you can do a race; calendar here. Forests are somehow different from those in Flanders. More hilly areas, different vegetation, ...

Map extract picked from the site of the best belgian elite runner Fabien Pasquasy.

There are more clubs in this region (13), but about the same amount of runners in total.

The Belgian ranking is lead by Pieter Hendrickx and Fabien Pasquasy, both have the same amount of point.

In the top 30 of this ranking there are 21 Flemish boys and 9 Walloon boys. In the top 10 however there is a balance 5-5. Let's see what happens in the next big events in Belgium, next week and the week after that.