Oeyen wins Sylvester - Day 1

At today's first day of the five-day sylvester orienteering event, no-one was able to match the pace of Jan Oeyen (Borasca). He is continuing his winning streak, which started at the widely reported WC event in Heidehuizen and included the underreported non-WC event in Reusel (NL).

A quick look at the splittimes reveals that, after Britain's Nick Barrable had a blitzstart, Oeyen took the lead at control 3, and managed to keep up with the pace for the rest of the race, loosing only a little time on the way to control 8.

Barrable, however, could not keep his speed, but was passed around mid-course by IF Brahe's Bart Delobel, who was quite satisfied with his race initially, but was eventually forced to admit that he had lost more time than he expected.

Nonetheless, it's Barrable who scores the big points today for the final standings in the event, since neither Oeyen nor Delobel will run enough days to be ranked. With some other Flemish top-10-of-today-runners like Hoekx and Franssen only competing two days, this leaves the Flemish hopes in the hands of Jeremy Genar and Wannes Hendrickx.

In the women's class, it was Veerle Tulleneers who ran away with the flowers today, with a one-minute gap to Ukrainian talent Masha Semak and some 2,5 minutes in front of hamok's Greet Oeyen, sister of. We were only able to catch Oeyen for a quick reaction after the race and she told us that she made no big mistakes during the race, but was still lacking the speed needed for the fast race in Herentals today.

Tomorrow's BELRanking race in Solterheide will bring a different type of terrain to the competitors, at the steep edges of the Maas-valley. As the nickname Folterheide tries to explain, competitors will start to like any other map with brambles after their race and never complain again. We are looking forward to the results.

• Results
• Splits
• Map (Vladi)
• Map H21E
• Pictures