OK Nuts 2021 Results

Posted on 9 May 2021 By Paul Street

For times and splits please view the whole event .pdf summaries in the body of this post, or follow the links to Winsplits or Routegadget or SPORTident live timing below.

Results are ~~provisional until end of Wednesday~~ now final.

We have some lost property, left in the parking field, the timing tent or found in the woods. This includes a pair of red O shoes, a blue and white buff, and navy overtrousers with a white/blue leg stripe plus a stainless steel drinks beaker. Please email

Open Classes

The OK Nuts Trophy 2021 winner is Ben Mitchell of Swansea Bay Orienteering Club. Aidan Rigby of Cleveland Orienteering Klub was second, 28 seconds down, and Peter Molloy of Forth Valley Orienteers was third.

M21 Results (.pdf)

The Heather Monro Trophy winner is Megan Carter-Davies of Swansea Bay Orienteering Club. Second was Sarah Rollins of Southern Navigators, one second ahead of third place Abi Weeds from the home club, South London Orienteers..

W21 Results (.pdf)

Top Three in each Class

Results – Top Three in each age class (.pdf 600KB)

Organisers’ Report

We would like to thank the forty SLOW members who helped on the day, putting out and collecting in controls, helping you park, seeing you off at the start, watching for your safety at the timed-out crossing and sundry other tasks.

The core team put in extensive work last Autumn for the event that we pulled two days before entries would have opened. When the chance to go with the new date – on what may have been the best Sunday possible given the vegetation and weather – we had the design ready. There was still a lot to do though. The new date needed new permissions (including finding a car park), the map had changed, and the COVID protocols had changed. So suddenly there were unexpected big time demands, particularly on the planner and controller. So we want to thank the core team for the last month, and for short notice rescheduling of their lives to find the time to get things ready for yesterday.

The thirteen courses were the work of planner Andy Jones, assisted by controller Sue Crickmore of Southdowns. We think they made excellent use of some of the best terrain for orienteering in Southern England and set appropriate challenges across the age classes. Throughout they were supported by Don McKerrow, sketching updates for the map as he followed them. On the organisation side, a tremendous amount of the burden was carried by Charlie Turner and Gordon Parker, both experienced controllers themselves. It is Charlie who manages all our relationships with landowners in and around the area; it was he who obtained the permissions and handled some issues that arose. And it was he that spotted the chance to hold the event this month and persuaded the rest of us what a good idea it was. Gordon is a de-facto co-organiser for all big races SLOW put on. He setup and ran the entry system, he looked after the timing, and he planned and handled the equipment arrangements for the whole event. The start, which we hope you liked, with all its necessary COVID secure arrangements, was the result of a lot of thought by Alan Leakey who also led the start team on the day.

We congratulate the class winners on their performances, and thank all of you for coming. One disappointment was not being able to have a prizegiving, as the field and weather would have been lovely for it.

Finally we have a little tip, courtesy of Gordon. If, as a group of you gather in the car park field at the end of a long day, and one of you goes through all the collected controls only to announce “we’re missing one box”, think of this. An activated SIAC card is your sniffer-dog like friend. Make sure you turned off all the boxes you do have, and activate one or more SIACs. Take them where the missing box could be. In the grass, in rucksacks, or hiding in a material fold of a control flag, deep in a clear plastic box, in the middle of a lot of stakes and notices, in the back of a van. Imagine our collective delight when the SIAC card flashed and beeped and led us to our quarry. We left on a high.

Sarah Brown, Paul Street

Planner’s Report

We originally planned to hold this event in November as some late autumn relief from the long orienteering drought. LIDAR assisted re-mapping is planned for the future and we were only envisaging level C so Don McKerrow and I agreed the map would just be updated where it was needed for the courses. The bracken was pretty forbidding across much of the area and I wrote off the northern part of Winterfold Forest as a result – it also gets used a fair amount by film crews. Pitch Hill is heavily used by mountain bikers so only black, brown and short brown were planned to use it. COVID requirements hoovered up helper availability so Paul and Sarah and I decided on just one manned road crossing that would be used in two directions.

Short green was the shortest course that could make a worthwhile crossing of the road. Likewise, blue was the shortest course that could make worthwhile use of the detailed woods above the southern scarp slope. The shortest courses were contained within the enchanting runnable woodland of Bentley Copse, for which Don kindly produced a bespoke 1:7500 version of the map. The planning was largely complete when the second round of COVID controls was announced and the event was postponed.

The event was resurrected for May. I found that my planning was not as largely complete as I had thought, particularly when controller Sue got to grips with my efforts on the white and yellow courses (sad face). The course overprints were congested in places, mainly due to the single manned road crossing and some planning trickery, so I sought financial authority to have the maps printed both sides for most courses, split into part one and part two. The start locations had to be re-jigged because we couldn’t access them through Bentley Copse campsite as originally planned.

The planning ethos was 1) use all the most attractive and runnable terrain 2) put some long legs into the longer courses 3) go to some exciting places e.g. 189 on top of the ‘crag’ 4) don’t make the shorter courses too physical – albeit bilberry and hills are the very essence of Winterfold 5) encourage some running through the terrain on the shorter courses. I hope the courses were to your liking.

Thanks to controller Sue, organisers Paul & Sarah, mapper Don, land agent Charlie, oberleutnant Gordon (the Rick Wakeman of Sport Ident), control hangers Karen, Simon, Mike, Mike, Steph, Don & Tom, all SLOW helpers, Hurtwood Control, Mr. McAllister – and most of all to you the competitors, who made all the work worthwhile. What a great forest!

Andy Jones