Andrew shows his continental flair at championships

FORRES Academy student Andrew Barr flew out to Portugal last week as part of the 11-strong Great Britain Team for the European Youth Orienteering Championships.

THE event takes place every two years to help national teams prepare their best juniors for the World Junior Championships and beyond. With the sport booming in popularity across Europe, there were 32 countries represented. Several runners were recognisable by their surnames as children of previous senior world champions and the standard was by far the best that the 16-year old Dyke teenager had ever encountered.

The three days of competition got under way in the medieval town of Óbidos with the sprint-distance event where the course was planned for a winning time of 12 minutes. The race started and finished in the grounds of the 12th Century castle and challenged the athletes with some tricky route choices involving steps and steep, intricate alleyways. Only seven minutes separated first from last, with Barr’s time of 13:32 just over two minutes behind the winner and good enough for 40th place in the M16s.

Saturday saw the athletes head to the forested dunes at Ferrel, about 30 miles north of Lisbon. The terrain was similar in many ways to Roseisle and Lossie Forests, but with live internet tracking going round the world, and large numbers of spectators, that’s where the familiarity stopped. The competition was all about learning to deal with this kind of pressure and all four Scottish-based under-17 boys came through relatively unscathed. Barr made an early error forcing him to take risks later on as he upped the pace to try to recover – not easy at this level. His 50th place in 51:27 for the 7.2 Km course put him just over half way down the field, and he was able to take great confidence at holding it together while pushing hard in the latter stages.

Sunday’s relay event at nearby Vale Benfeito was the most pressurised race of the lot, but it brought the best out of the GB Team. With three runners per team, a major mistake from any of them would spell disaster so mental preparation was everything. International orienteering relays are cleverly planned so that competitors, despite racing head to head for much of the race, are occasionally split up by “forking” where different runners divert to different controls. Over the three legs, all teams end up having completed exactly the same three courses, but in different orders.

Barr was given the task of running first leg where absolute focus is the key. Thanks to his best run of the weekend he came back in 7th place, only seven seconds off 5th on the tails of a group of athletes from Russia, Latvia, France and Austria. He handed over to his friend and training partner Callum White of Inverness. White had the run of his life bringing the team up to 6th, a position which Forth Valley’s Daniel Stansfield managed to hang on to. The delighted trio were over the moon with the final result. Andrew said, “It was amazing, really intense running within the pack. I really enjoyed it. It was a great race.”