Sylvester day 3 Grote Heide zuid: map and results

Who will win the next edition from the sylvester 5-days in Belgium and will be remembered as the successor from Jörgen Wickholm? Today the 3rd stage took place in the Netherlands, close to Eindhoven. Also this time the snow was present and specially in the open area it affected the runability seriously. Good starttimes are they key to success during this competition (and since the starttimes aren't grouped for each hour, it isn't very fair).

In men elite class Thomas van der Kleij (one of the favourits for the overall victory) had an early starttime and had to fight through the snow. Despite this disadvantage he ran a strong race and finished in 51'. But Gert Claes (who surprised everybody yesterday with a solid race) started 2 minutes behind van der Kleij and succeeded to catch up with him right before the last technical area (at control 18). Surprisingly van der Kleij didn't want to take the lead and decided that the orienteering was up to Claes. This story reminds us to the conflict between Andersson and Gueorgiou. But this time nobody punched the wrong control and Claes finished in 49'.

Pieter Hendrickx (who became 2nd at the 5days in 2009) is still suffering from his knee injury and didn't succeed to fight for the victory the previous days. Also today he didn't take risks and didn't run full speed.

Jeroen Hoekx was the next runner who ran strong today. He succeeded in beating the best time and finished in 48'. Yannick Michiels, Desmond Franssen and Jan Oeyen started behind him but none of them ran a faster race. Only Tomas Hendrickx (who already won the 2nd stage) ran 20 seconds faster than Hoekx.

Among the late starters there were still some good runners who are able to beat the current winning time. One of them is the Swiss runner Daniel Zwiker (who won the 1st stage). He ran 47' today and became 2nd. Alex Lubina has the speed and succeeded to avoid mistake, so he won the race with a clear lead (45'). He also takes the 1st position in the total ranking.

In women elite class Kim Geypen ran again a decent race and probably she's on her way to win the 5days. But Iliana Shandurkova took the day victory. She didn't run the first stage, but she's still able to fight for the overall victory. Julia Blomqvist (fighting for the poduim) got disqualified and didn't finish today.

Results
Splits
Map (Jeroen Hoekx)
Map (Desmond Franssen)