An update from our Performance Director from JWOC
While Grace Molloy has been grabbing the headlines for her medal winning performances, Claire Ward gives us an insight into all the action from Junior World Orienteering Championships in Denmark. Lots of positive performances from the Scottish athletes, with more to come!
Amazing Grace
Grace Molloy (FVO) has made an incredible start to the Junior World Orienteering Championship (JWOC) week, taking two bronze medals fromtwo races – the sprint and the long! The JOK chasing sprint women’s open champion powered around Sunday’s tricky, intricate, urban sprint race to take the first JWOC women’s medal for 15 years. Monday’s long was a completely different challenge, with fast, runnable forest interspersed with low visibility bushy patches. A cool head and intense concentration was needed. Grace regained her focus after a mid-race wobble to take bronze again, the double medalist putting in perhaps the best ever British JWOC performance – and still with two races to go. She commented: “It was the best long race of my life, I made clear route choices and executed them with very few mistakes. I gave everything and struggled up the final hill but couldn’t be happier with the result”
Grace’s performances really have been phenomenal, but hers are not the only performances to celebrate. JWOC is a tough stage to get a good result on. At the senior world championship, each nation can enter a maximum of 3 athletes, but at JWOC each nation can enter 6, making the strength and depth of the competition considerable. In the sprint race, MAROC’s Eilidh Campbell’s 33rd in her JWOC debut is a superb performance. As too was Finlay Todd (INVOC) 32nd and Peter Molloy (FVO) 43rd in the long. Megan Keith (INVOC) and Freddie Carcas (INT) both showed their class, running fastest of all the field in some sections of both the sprint and long races, but had trouble with some tricky controls, and will be looking forward to putting this right during the rest of the week.
The races continues on Wednesday with the middle qualifier, Thursday with the middle final and Friday with the relay. Full results, maps and GPS tracking can be found on the event website here:https://www.jwoc2019.dk/