Discussion: Largest "O" event in North America?

Maybe this is common knowledge amongst attack point regulars, but a post about wanting to make the upcoming North American champs the largest event in NA got me wondering what that would be to date?

Counting Scout events?
WOC 93 public events?
Or just normal A/champoinship events?

Brought up once before, but no definitive answer.

The school kids race in Hamilton? That one is 1100+, right?

Depending on yoir definition of "orienteering", The Gig Harbor Street Scramble (using USGS maps) has seen numbers in the 700-800 range in past years, and the original Thursday Adventure Runs in Portland (using street maps) were around 1000.

It seems like classic orienteering peaked somewhere in the 80s in North America.

It's in decline in Australia too. That's the power of non-physical related entertainment.

Having said that, we had 800+ entries at our recent WA schools champs (compulsory for the kids who do it), about 0.3% of which do orienteering outside of this event.

The 2002 Asia Pacific Champs in Alberta attracted over 820 competitors from 31 countries for a weeklong festival incorporating seven days of championship orienteering (including APOC, NAOC, COC) plus a number of "park" events ("sprint" format was just a baby back then). I figure it was the largest international mutliday event in Canada that year for individual sports ;-) (i.e. not counting softball tournaments)

Somehow it seemed back then that there were fewer major events to attend and the quality of the "big" events was marked better than the local events. Nowadays it seems there are so many great international events to choose from (and easier to figure out where and when they are thanks to the internet), and local events are much higher quality with, for example, ePunching and good maps and good courses being regularly available each Wednesday at a local park. Because of this, in part, I feel the bigger events are finding it a bit tougher to attract big crowds. Lots of competition

If I remember correctly there were about 1200 at WMOCs in Edmonton and that WMOCs in Minnesota had 1500+

@AZ: Does the Gatineau Loppet not count? :-) Looks like they had 900+ for the Classic and 1300+ for the Skate in 2002 (not 31 countries though).

The 2012 Schools Race Challenge in Hamilton had 1069 participants on 522 teams (teams of 2 are standard for this event).

VWC 1997 had more than 1900, but less than 2000, participants.

The Hamilton Adventure Running Schools Challenge is an annual race first hosted in the mid 1970's. Participation has been over 300 for about 20 years but the last decade the race has really started to grow when GHO member Ray Kitowski started organizing the race. The challenge is a team orienteering race with teams of two being standard as PinkSocks mentioned. This year was our first year over 1000 participants though the previous few years we had over 1000 pre-registered but fewer on race day. I think we have been over 900 participants for the last four years. Given the growth of Adventure Running Kids we are starting to see an interest in starting more school based orienteering teams in Hamilton. I suspect Ontario's Golden Horseshoe Region could soon easily support three school orienteering races per year in the 1000 participant range.

@bishop22 - ;-) I'm sure, somehow, it doesn't ;-) How about a requirement that "international" means more than 50% of the participants are from other countries? (which, as 'stretched' as it sounds, should be a useful positive for orienteering when applying for grants and for showing governments that our events generate quite a lot of tourism activity compared to others)

APOC 2002 was the first orienteering event I went to that really blew my mind and got me to think big about orienteering as a 14 year old kid.