The squad composed by Laisev, Calvo and Tamarit takes the first place with 23/24 points
99 competitors, divided into 33 teams, took part on Saturday, July 12th at the demonstrative PreO Relay around the lake of Lavarone. This format, which should replace in the future the actual team event, requires some talent in strategy and the awareness of one's own technical abilities and limits.
Welcomed by a sunny morning, the teams had 3 hours time to complete 24 tasks in free order; each squad could freely use this time among its components; someone opted for splitting the controls by area, someone by difficulty, someone by distance from the point of start and finish. After the course, the 2nd and 3rd athlete had also 2 easy timed controls.
The winning team was the mixed group composed by the Estonian Laisev, who lives in Finland and trains with some of the best trailorienteers of the world, and the spanish duo Calvo and Tamarit. They were the only ones to guess 23 of the 24 controls prepared by the course setter Giuliano Michelotti.
On the podium also the n° 1 Finnish team (Turto, Määttälä, Rusanen) and the Italian open class team (Cereser , Pfister, Cera), who relegated in 4th and 5th place the two swedish teams “World Champions” and “The beauty and the beasts”, all with 2 mistakes; then with 3 mistakes followed the Croatian, Finnland 2, the mixed team composed by Belgium, China and WTOC-Speaker Alberto Grilli, Lithuania 1, GB 1 and Denmark 1.
The system seems very interesting and may probably be improved by playing with the time limits.