Van Gestel in Gazet Van Antwerpen

While the UK orienteering community is cheering about Graham Gristwoord appearing in The Guardian, the Belgian community is also happy that Dries Van Gestel is featured in the Gazet Van Antwerpen (GVA), believed to be the equivalent of the Guardian by as much as 16% of the Belgian population and sporting 135 000 copies printed, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Slightly better numbers indicate 127 289 copies printed of which 105 091 are sold.

For the convenience of our international audience, we will try to translate selected portions into English.

Let's start with the introduction:

Dries Van Gestel, originating from Vosselaar, is single, engineering Ph.D. student and 28 years old. His passion? Gliding.

He goes on to talk about his weekend. His friday evening is hardly spectacular, with Dries staying in Leuven to work on his thesis instead of taking the bus home. On saturday, he buys indoor running shoes and is working on his thesis on solar panels in the afternoon. A "Casino Royale" party is attended on saturday evening. Before commenting on this obviously old concept, please remember that "Quantum" parties are organised all day long at his work at IMEC.

Sunday is where it gets interesting. Van Gestel:

Since I'm in Leuven, I hope to be able to carpool to the orienteering event in Hamont. (in vain red.) On tuesday evening, I participate in the trainings of SLOK, the Student Leuven Orienteering Klub. During the winter, these trainings are mostly running trainings. We run 10 to 16kms. In other seasons, we do map trainings in the Arenbergpark.

Now, the interview reaches the hard part, explaining orienteering in as few words as possible:

As a sport, orienteering is a combination of physical strength and thinking. The goal is to find some control points and find them as fast as possible. It is similar to gliding, my real passion.

We'll leave the finer details of gliding to those actually reading the newspaper and will finish by mentioning that the article ends with a link to http://www.orientatie.org/ and a nice photo of a family doing orienteering, which is great, since orienteering as a really tough sport gets enough media attention already!