Freddie Carcas report from The World Games
This summer we awarded a grant to Freddie Carcas to assist with the cost of representing GBR at The World Games in China (see award). Here Freddie reports on his experience of the competition.
I would like to thank the orienteering foundation for supporting my trip to the World Games in Chengdu, China. This helped to subsidise the cost of travel to China and allowed me to focus on the competitions!
The World Games is bit like the Olympics for smaller sports. Events range from the tug of war to squash and orienteering. For some nations (not Britain!), the competition is funded by the countries Olympic budget and great weight is put on performances there to help secure funding for the upcoming years. This means that the field at the World Games can be very competitive, although some big orienteering nations like Norway and Finland chose not to compete this year.
The orienteering schedule featured 3 competitions, a middle, a sprint and a sprint relay. The middle terrain was especially challenging and hard to prepare for. It was held in orange groves, around small houses in farmland. Additionally, the competition was run in 35 degree heat, with around 80% humidity. I did not have a great race, and physically struggled in the heat, having to slow my pace to ensure I could make it to the finish. Two days later, we had to deal with the opposite conditions and some monsoon rain for our sprint race. It was a very fun race around a complex Agricultural Park, with loads of intricate route choices. I lost too much time at the start, struggling to be aggressive enough in complicated terrain but managed to pick up my speed towards the end before a small mistake on the second last control dashed any chances of a good result. The final event was the sprint relay competition that was an exciting and fun challenge. I had a stable run apart from a mistake misreading some of the intricate detail. I managed to catch up with a few teams towards the end and helped the GB team finished in 10th position.
The atmosphere of the athlete village, an Olympic style opening ceremony and getting to experience some cool terrains made this a special week and it wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the Orienteering Foundation!
Very sadly an athlete collapsed when competing in the middle distance and passed away following the competition and my thoughts go out to his family and friends.
Whilst the competitions didn’t go how I had hoped, the experience of competing in some very unusual terrains will set me up well for the future. As I am writing this report, I have just arrived back from the European Championships where I managed to reach the semi-finals and placed 15th in the knock-out sprint. This result was undoubtedly helped by the experience of competing at the World Games.