Moravian Orienteering Club achieve their greatest weekend ever with four elite goal medals at UK’s premier international event

It’s been described as the finest weekend in a sport club’s history.

Moravian Orienteers sent a group to the UK’s premier international competition, the JK International (Jan Kjellström International Festival of Orienteering) in Sheffield.

Competing in the elite classes, the Moray outfit came home with an impressive haul of four goal and one silver medal.

That was in the company of over 2600 competitors representing 140 clubs and 28 countries, making it a truly International event.

Veteran club member and competitor Eddie Harwood said it was “surely Moravian’s greatest weekend ever”.

This year the event took place in and around Sheffield with a stunning sprint race setting right in the centre of the city. The elites had to manage very complicated routes around multi-level terrain with steps, tunnels and all sorts to interpret at high speed, followed by another section navigating around multi-levels in the canal basin.

Former Forres Academy pupil and Edinburgh student Isobel Howard produced possibly the most outstanding run of her career, winning W 20-Elite (women’s 20-and-under) by over a minute, a big margin in a sprint race.

This course was shared with the full adult elites and incredibly Howard came third out of the whole field.

Finlay McLuckie in his first year as a M18-Elite also achieved a gold medal with a five-second margin. Andrew Campbell backed up the junior elites with a silver medal in the M55+ in a field of over 100 runners.

After the intense speed and concentration of the sprint came the two forest events, the middle and the long. These are added together to give the overall trophies.

The middle took place in a deciduous woodland covering a wealth of historical industrial land accentuated by hundreds of pits - bell pits from casting bells, pits from mining activities and pits from World War II bombs - very complex terrain.

McLuckie ran strongly in the ultra competitive M18-Elite class coming second equal just 27 seconds down, while Howard won again in W20-Elite.

The long race took place in very mixed terrain starting on a boulder-strewn steep-wooded hillside with extremely complex navigation, followed by a short section of fast open moorland before diving back into a forested mix of just about everything.

Having done so well in the middle, McLuckie earned a late start, unfortunately too late to be able to catch his plane back to Scotland for school on Monday.

The organisers set him off half an hour before the rest of the field, so he had to create new routes through the tough vegetation and had no feedback from seeing others.

This makes his second place in the race doubly remarkable. This was enough to give him overall gold by 18 and 28 seconds from second and third over nearly two hours of complex running.

Howard won her third race of the weekend, completing a triple gold achievement.

However the most astonishing Moravian result of the day was from Michael Bishenden in M20-Elite. Having achieved a ground breaking fourth place in the middle he ended up two better and won silver for his first ever major medal.

To complete their stunning weekend, Howard anchored Edinburgh University to victory in the ladies relay whilst Michael Bishenden helped Edinburgh Uni’s second men's team into fifth place.