Sylvester Day 1: Oostelbeersche heide

The first day of the Sylvester 5 days took place today near Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The terrain was not the white open forest people expected. Instead, the course setting gave the race Clermont-Ferrand-like allures at times, with small contour features in the green parts of the forest.

Looking at the results, it's quite clear that some of the favourites made big mistakes today. Thomas van der Kleij (***, 14th ) had the excuse of being ill, gastroenteritis (more commonly known as stomach flu). His opponent, Jan Oeyen (*, 6th), commented that today's race was not a good companion to his carefully learned Flemish orienteering instincts. To be able to even have a remote chance of understanding the map in some areas, you had to come to a halt and stare at the paper for seconds. Was the printing quality the culprit, or was it the map scale that should have been reduced to 1:7500? We don't know, but this vision was shared among most orienteers we've talked to. Bart Delobel (***, 16th) also had an off-day, just like Daniel Zwiker (*, 10th), who barely made the top ten today.

Some of the other favourites performed better: Tom Herremans (**, 3rd) was faster than all his younger hamok teammates, but still made quite a few mistakes. Your correspondent (-, 4th) started off fast and took the lead early on, but could not avoid making mistakes later on. The impact of one ice cream too many yesterday was quite noticeable on my running speed, which was not up to par with the one of the eventual winner Ken Peeters (**, 1st). Peeters' race was not that great either, with more than 5 minutes of mistakes, but still good enough to win the race by 1:17 to his teammate Jeremy Genar (*, 2nd).

In the women's class, we saw a clear victory by Kim Geypen (-, 1st). She was 3 minutes faster than Finnish runner Sabrina Merihein (**, 2nd). Geypen made a few mistakes, but was nonetheless satisfied with her result. Katja Stöckli (*, 3rd) completed the winners rostrum, exactly 7 minutes behind Geypen, who will only run 3 days.

The other favourites are already rather far behind: Sadie Zwikker (**, 4th) is still in the running for a top result, but Saartje Sallaerts (**, 8th) lost some time, just like Els Talloen (*, 6th) and Kim Steegen (*, 7th).

Three-star runners Barrable (***,-) and Semak (***, -), the winners of last year, were absent today. We hope to see them in the starting box tomorrow.

• Results
• Splits
• Map