Sylvester stage 4: Claire Ward and Tomas Hendrickx

The last 2 days from the sylvester 5-days 2013 take place in the militar area from Leopoldsburg. Today Stalleykerheide was the place to be and borasca organised a nice competition. In men's class Hendrickx took his 3rd victory and in women's class Claire Ward took her 2nd victory. Both athletes are also leading the overall ranking.

Tomas Hendrickx focused this winter mainly on crosscountry races and did almost no orienteering before this 5-days event. Even without orienteeringtraining he succeeded to run without big misktakes today. He lost a bit time at the first control, but overtook everybody with his highest running speed. This victory makes him the overall winner from Sylvester 5-days 2013 (for the 2nd year in a row: article edition 2012). Wait and see if he'll run full speed again tomorrow (source).

Tomas Hendrickx next to his father and world champion Roger Hendrickx, both enjoying the sunny Belgian weather in Lommel

 For Christoph Brandt the beginning of the race was similar to yesterday. He again had some problems with the first 2 controls and afterwards he could match the speed from Hendrickx. He became 2nd, 1 minute down to the best time. Also Desmond Franssen could avoid mistakes today and finished into 3rd position, 50 seconds ahead of Francois Joly. Benjamin Anciaux had the 5th best time today, but was disqualified because of punching the wrong 4th control.

Jeroen Hoekx, Jeremy Genar and Winston Franssen are sick or not recovered from sickness yet. Hopefully their situation improves fast, so they can fight for a good result tomorrow. Yannick Michiels will be the coursesetter and promised a nice coursesetting on 'Zwarte weg' (map Olle Karner). Also the distances will be a little bit longer than the previous days.

In class D21E we expected an exciting duel between Sophie Tritschler and Claire Ward. Tritschler told us after her race that her performance from today was probably not good enough for the victory. She made 2 big mistakes (2 controls in a pit which she passed only by a few meters without seeing them) and lost too much time there. It's the 2nd year in row that her family spents their christmasholidays in Belgium. They like to combine the nice orienteering events with some city trips in the afternoon.  Last year Tritschler finished 2nd in the overall ranking (Miek Fabré won). If she wants to win this edition, she'll need a great performance tomorrow.

Claire Ward took her 2nd victory and is the current overall leader.

The current leader in women's class is Claire Ward. She took her 2nd victory today, 2min30 faster than Tritschler. Iliana Ilieva took the 3rd spot ahead of our Belgian athletes: Mira Scheir (4th), Saartje Sallaerts (5th) and Nancy Wenderickx (6th).

Today the organisation again offered live gps tracking. The youth runners (H16 and D14) were tracked during their race in Stalleykerheide. You can see it again here.

Results
Splits
Map (H21E - Desmond Franssen)
Overall ranking
GPS tracking replay youth