On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, David Dermott wrote:

According to the book "Orienteering" (Hans Bengtsson,1977) the first
civilian Ski-O competition was held in Sweden Mar 4, 1900! The first
civilian dry-land O competition was in Norway Oct 7 1900. Before that
there were O competitions (on and off skis) in the military.

The book also makes the claim that the 1949 Olympic Conference in Rome
gave Ski-O "Olympic Status"!

Yes but that doesn't require games organizers to actually include the
sport in their games. While ski-O has been an Olympic approved sport
for a long time it has never actually been included in the games. There
have been several attempts to get it included but the O' crowd doesn't
seem to have whatever it takes to entice organizers to include it.
(Read however you like.)


Vasaloppet is still on my "to do" list- probably the ppet Spr.
I've visited the VL area twice in summer on bicycle tours,
spent several hours in the VL museum in Mora. I cycled the
VL route (on the paved highway which parallels the trail)
and it sure didn't seem flat to me!

We skied Oppet Spr once. My impression was that while it's not pancake
flat, there were few sizable climbs. It was a warm-ish day with temps
hovering close to 0 C. People were having waxing fits all along the
way. At one point our kick became non-existant. Having already tired
of messing with wax we just said "oh bother" and proceeded to double-pole
the next 20 km until the kick returned. Turned out to be not all that
difficult at all. We were passing tons of people, even during this
section, both uphill and down. The most important thing at this point
was to look ahead and keep jumping from one track to the next so we
could carry our downhill momentum into the next uphill and not get stuck
behind someone and have to slow down. (In other words it's better to DP
half or 1/3 of an uphill than to DP all of it!)

-Mitch