Discussion: OUSA champions

You're the first one to make the request for full results for SML, and if I can find them all I'll work on that. But I've been stymied by missing websites, so it may be a hit and miss thing. If I can find them all in ONA so much th better, but I may have to do some digging and requesting.

For all but 1999 there *are* links to the results pages I found so you can look there but I do understand it's nice to list champions in each.

After the A meet in October. :-)

Everybody knows that the main event of the year in Orienteering is Billygoat, at least in the Western hemisphere.

In "traditional" orienteering, true. But just as Beach Volleyball gets more attention than "regular" Volleyball, these days the most significant championship among navigation sports takes place at Warner Farm in Sunderland.

I took a look at the results from the US Champs, and it appears that we're approaching the goal we seem to have had for a long time.

Of the 107 US-eligible people who managed to finish both days within the time limit, 61% got to take home medals, and just under half of those were national championship gold medals. Only 42 finishers went home empty-handed. The largest categories in terms of finishers were M21 and M60 (tied), followed by M55 and M45. Only 11 categories had more than three eligible finishers, over half of which were over-50 categories, and only one (F20) was under 21. There were 50% more finishers in >60 categories than in <21 categories.

A bunch of factors at play here, including scheduling, location, competition from other championship events. I'm not intending to imply that it should have been otherwise, but it's getting to be a pretty thin championship. Was this the smallest one ever?

Well, Gail and I did our best to keep the median and mean ages as low as we could.

Though if we had come, and if I had been smart enough to run M35, then just finishing would have sent us home with medals, making your statistics even more compelling/appalling.

The smallest one? I'd guess Alaska had a relatively small number, understandable. Other than that, maybe have to go back to the early/mid-70s?

Alaska had 92 eligible two-day finishers. That's being fair and using the same slanted measure that I used for the BAOC meet. Total attendance, though, was considerably higher, due to two reasons: 1) foreigners (including Canadians) accounted for a decent number of people, and 2) I'm not counting the B categories, which were still in play in 1994, but not championship-eligible. Total number of starters for at least one day at BAOC was 176 (I think) as compared with 215 in Alaska.