Discussion: Finding local orienteering events in France not easy

Hi everyone,

I will soon be in France for 3 weeks, doing some traveling arround all over, and I am trying to find local club foot-O events in the places I will be and it's proving to be very difficult! All the websites either are very out-of-date (some cases 4 years), don't seem to have events on (allegedly) or the websites have disappeared alltogether... Any suggestions on how I can find my next event? First stop... Toulon, Var (83).

Cheers.

P.S. I do speak French...

What's foot-O?

Funnily I had the same question at the Scottish 6-days. Basically, you can check the website of the French federation, which has a calendar (yearly published, so not necessarily up to date, but still quite complete) as well as contact for all clubs. For Toulon, I would recommend to contact Le Pradet club (POLES), which is a good club in southern France.
http://ffco.asso.fr/site%20guigui/pagecalendrier.h...
http://ffco.asso.fr/site%20guigui/pagecarte.htm

Then you have http://www.matrace.fr/calendrier.php which has a calendar dedicated to O events and other nature sports, as well as being a routegadget server.

Biggest events are on woo calendar. If you are in France around the end of October, there will be 5 days of orienteering in Provence with the sprint and night championships. (for once, the english part of the website seems not so bad)
http://provence2009.com/?lng=en

Simon pointed you in the right direction. The FFCO website has all the contact details for the clubs as well as a good calendar. French orienteering is well organised and you can find events most weekends in many areas of France. The Matrace site is a bit iffy on the calendar side and isn't updated that often. If you make it up to Paris, I can highly recommend looking up the LIFCO website (http://www.lifco.fr/) as there are events every weekend, including a lot in Fontainebleau. The Regionale events are particularly good. There is also a series of long distance races in Sept Oct and Nov in the Rhone Alpes region that are good fun (www.lraco.net). Bon voyage.