Switzerland beats Finland and Sweden

Map extract of the WRE in Belgium 30 december 2007

Few events to go this year. So no changes are to be expected in the World Ranking of orienteering. Unless all top runners will come to the WRE in Belgium on the 30th of December. This is the last day of "Sylvester 5-days"

Other events that are still to come this year are the following:

Blodslitet (NORWAY) 20/10

Bükkfennsík Cup Day 2 (HUNGARY) 21/10

Istanbul 5-Days (TURKEY) 27/10 2007

US Individual O-Championships - Day 1 (USA) 3/11

Long Distance Championships (ISRAEL) 24/11

Top 10 of men World Ranking:
1 Thierry Gueorgiou

2 Matthias Merz
3 Daniel Hubmann
4 Anders Nordberg
5 Valentin Novikov

6 David Andersson

7 Mikhail Mamleev

8 Michal Smola
9 Mats Haldin
10 Emil Wingstedt
These runners run for 8 different countries.

We are still waiting for the new special rules for WCUP 2008 to be released. But probably the ranking of the countries will decide how many runners can participate at the World Cup.

Therefor I wanted to have a look at this ranking, but the link of this "federation league table" at the website of IOF shows us this strange picture…

I wonder what this means.

Last year we had this ranking:

I created a ranking of this moment. Switzerland is on top now, Finland in 2nd and Sweden is back in 3th place. Russia is only in 17th spot. This means in next world cup will be only 5 russians.

Belgium is in 23 th spot. They can however still improve with the last WRE of the year. This WRE is in the sandy dunes of Flanders where JWOC 1997 took place.

This last WRE of the season could be the First warming up for next season.