Orienteering World Cup events in Czechia #2 (1986)

The Orienteering World Cup will again be hosted by the Czech Republic after 5 years. At the same time, this year marks exactly 40 years since the first unofficial edition of the Orienteering World Cup. Let’s take a look at the history of these races in the Czech Republic in the series by O-News.cz. During the winter and spring of 2023, we will offer a behind-the-scenes look at all of these international events. Today we continue with the year 1986.

In the last article, we focused on the history of the Orienteering World Cup in 1984 in Dolánky near Turnov.

1986: Officially “World Cup”

As mentioned in the last article, even though we had a World Cup race in 1984, it was still an unofficial event. That changed in 1986, when the history of the Orienteering World Cup officially started. OWC were held every two years until 2004, when the race series were managed to be every year. And what was it like in 1986? The first race took place in the birthplace of orienteering – Norway. The second and third races were held in the USA (Hamilton and New York). The French Lorraine welcomed the competitors on the fourth round, and the Swedish Halland on the fifth. The sixth race took place in Czechia in Branžež, and the remaining two took place in Eger (Hungary) and Pfannenstiel (Switzerland).

OWC again as a part of the five-day spectator races

In 1986, Jičín organizes another five-day orienteering event, this time at Branžež, and the World Cup race as part of these big races during the 3rd stage. The competitors were welcomed by Valečov Castle, where popular multi-day races on large-scale maps have been held in recent years. Even here, by the conditions of the time, the map was run on a detailed scale: 1:10 000, which was prepared by Josef Borůvka and Petr Uher. “The start was right at the castle. There was a historical fencing group and armorers started the competitors by raising their crossed swords. We tried to make every race something special,” recalled the then event director Jaroslav Havlík in OB magazine in 2006.

Czech competitors without a medal

This time, no Czech competitor has a say in the medal ranking. Kent Olsson won the men’s category. The fourth Vlastimil Uchytil lost less than 3 minutes, and the seventh was Jaroslav Kačmarčík: “It wasn’t bad, but physically it wasn’t that good.” In the women’s category, Sweden’s Sofie Ellen Olsvik won, the best of the Czechs was Ada Kuchařová in fifth place, Eva Bártová finished the race in eighth place.

Beautiful TV reports from that time

Thanks to digitized TV reports, you can watch the the race and the reactions of the competitors and winners. You can find everything on the Youtube channel SPORTCENTRUM Jičín and below you can recall the entire event of the 1986 Orienteering World Cup in Valečov.

In the next part of our series, we will look at the OWC 1988, which took place on the Silická planina.

The article was created in cooperation with our media partner O-News.cz.