Reflections on the 2024 Orienteering Season: Highlights, Awards, and Unforgettable Moments

As the 2024 orienteering season has come to an end, following the last stage of the Sylvester 5 Days, it’s time to reflect on the most impressive moments and performances of the year. The 'delaatstepost' team has distributed several awards with an international perspective, celebrating the highlights of the season.

 

Belgian orienteer of the year: Yannick Michiels

We can’t go past the performances of Yannick Michiels this year. However it wasn’t his strongest year, he succeeded to keep a 3th place in the sprint World Ranking. He achieved 11^th place in both sprint and KO sprint at WOC. Additionally, Michiels secured an 8^th and 5^th place in the first 2 World Cups of the year. Michiels also played a key role in relay competitions for his Finnish team Turun Metsänkävijät, running strong first legs at TioMila (changing over in 14th) and Jukola (changing over in 3rd). Outside of orienteering, he performed well in various (inter)national road running events.

Yannick Michiels in action during WOC in Edinbourgh

Belgian junior of the year: Tille de Smul

2024 was the last junior year of Tille de Smul. She managed to get some great results at JWOC, WOC and JEC. Her season highlights include a 15th place at JWOC Long, 12th in the JWOC sprint, 2nd place at the JWOC relay changeover, and a bronze medal in the JEC sprint. She also reached the final in both the sprint and KO sprint at WOC.  With these results, de Smul has firmly established herself as a rising star to watch in the years to come. If you think it is finally done with family de Smul at JWOC, you’re wrong cause we have still the very promising Mats de Smul with 2 years left at the Junior level. He’s been unlucky with injuries this season but ready to rock the next one.

Tille de Smul on her way to an A-finale

Best Belgian orienteering performance on international level: sprint relay on WOC & JWOC

This year’s best orienteering performance was so close that two winners were chosen. The Belgian team (Tille de Smul, Jorn Kennis, Rune de Clercq, and Sarah Rooman) secured an impressive 9th place (+2’58”) in the JWOC sprint relay, marking their best-ever result. Just two weeks later, the Belgian team at WOC (Tille de Smul, Yannick Michiels, Warre de Cuyper, and Marine Sillien) finished 11th (+4’05’’) at the WOC sprint relay which was again, a record result for Belgium. These performances offer great perspective for the future of Belgian sprint orienteering.

 

Belgian rising star: Anaïs Mazy

By winning almost everything there could be won this year at national level in W-16, an incredible 17^th spot at this year EYOC long distance and a 38^th place at EYOC sprint, Anaïs Mazy can be seen as an upcoming talent who we have to look out for at EYOC and JWOC the upcoming years. At EYOC in Poland she was the best Belgian and she showed once again what the family Mazy has to offer. 

Biggest mistake of the year (on international toplevel): final women WOC KO sprint

While not the biggest mistake of the year, the women’s KO sprint final at WOC 2024 in Edinburgh will certainly be remembered by many. During the final this year, the women took some really absurd route choices. Towards control 2, the best (and only good) option was to go almost straight. However, with Megan Carter Davies leading the pack, she decided to take a route towards the south. Losing up to 15 seconds (20 seconds slower than the men’s race). The rest of the pack just followed her, so not very active orienteering for them.

Control 2 with women (red) and men (blue)

Further, control 4-5 was one of the deciding legs where you could easily win or lose (a lot of) time with a different route choice. Carter Davies took a bad route choice towards the north but the other women (leading by Alexandersson) took an even worse route choice by running around a building where you could easily passed it via the north. In the end Carter Davies had a 10 seconds advantage but eventually she finished only in 5^th.

Control 4-5:
Megan Carter Davies (yellow): 2’06”
Tove Alexandersson (red): 2’18”
Riccardo Rancan (bleu variant): 1’39”

Control 5

Alexandersson won her 21^st world championship gold. This was one of the weirdest KO races in a really long time. At least the women's race was more exciting then the men's race (not in the last minute) where they all did the same routechoice on every control.

Picture of the year

This picture got taken at the finish of JWOC middle this year. The winner Jan Strýček, literally jumped across the finish line after an amazing race. This moment perfectly encapsulated the thrill and passion of the sport.

 

Notable mentions

2024 was also the year of the Olympic marathon of Matthias Kyburz. He putted orienteering away for a part of his season and followed his Olympic dream. Some of his incredible running performances listed: Winning Swiss Championship Half Marathon (1:02:25), 7^th in Paris Marathon (2:07:44) qualifying for the Olympic Marathon and 3th best Swiss ever, 21^st at the European Championship Half Marathon and becoming 30^th at the Olympic Marathon (2:11:32).

Sadly, the orienteering community had to say farewell to Nicola Manfredi, the singer of the beloved orienteering anthem "You and Me (orienteering version)," as well as Swiss elite runner Pascal Buchs, who passed away last week.

One of the things I’ll remember for certain this year happened during the sprint relay in Italy at round 2 of this year’s World Cup. The map of the sprint relay got accidentally leaked by the organisers and was downloaded several times. I won’t point fingers to anyone but I think it’s very fair of the Polish national team to disqualify themselves. The words of Hanna Sudol (a first year Polish senior) on Strava say enough:

“I never had so little fun when “orienteering”. Felt pretty shitty to stand on the start line knowing all the shorter routechoices, together with people who were just about to run a normal race. Motivation on the ground level, not feeling like it’s fair play. I wish we hadn’t been send the link to the yesterday’s GPS, where the organisers had accidentally put the map with today’s course. Lesson learned: never look at the map before the race, even if the others also got a chance to see it. Sport doesn’t make sense without fair play. That’s wasn’t orienteering, that wasn’t what I’m training for.”

 

2024 was a year full of surprises and good races, now we are ready for 2025 with EOC in Belgium!