Real orienteers care about challenging competitions

Recently IOF announced that WOC will include a mixed relay competition (woman - man - man woman) in the close future. Not every athlete is happy about running more sprint races instead of enjoying the challenging forest. Already some famous runners (Nordberg, Kinneberg, Troeng, Skogstad,...) signed the petition below.

Petition:
Are you also fed up by the fact that IOF is making sprint orienteering more important than the traditional disciplines middle and long? This petition is not meant to take sprint/urban orienteering down but we think that the real soul of orienteering is in a forest, where the challenges are much greater. IOF, please don’t try to "rape" our sport because you want more media-attention. In fact, we think you should try to find a better way to broadcast forest orienteering, without making too many compromises to the essentials of our sport.
 
What is Sprint orienteering doing to our sport? It’s removing more and more of our characteristics, and eventually it will just turn out to running with a map. I think running is a great sport, both 100 meter and marathon, and it is definitely interesting to watch on TV, but it’s just not what we do and why we started orienteering. A lot of international athletes aren't hoping for a mixed sprint relay at WOC. Even at national level (Belgium) physical testruns and urban sprint races are more important (> 50%) than technical orienteering selection races.

For us orienteering is about challenges. I love orienteering because of the challenges the sports give me. Continuously making the right decisions in a 90 minutes long distance, complex orienteering on the middle distance, constantly living on the edge between speed and security, is the reason why we keep doing this wonderful sport. Of course the physical part of our sport is very important, but in our opinion not the one that makes the difference between the good and the best.

I will send a mail to IOF when we reach 1000 voters!

This is your chance to protest against the sad new trend we are going through! Anyone noticed that the courses suggested for the Course of the year are mainly challenging long or middle distances? We hope that, in the future, we can all meet up in the middle of nowhere as much as possible!

Petition website