What is orienteering? It's a sport. You use a map to find marked spots in forest. Sometimes in cities, too.
You've got a map and a route drawn on it. You must find all the spots (marked on the map) in the forest. The winner is the one who does this fastest. To know the times, we use EMIT-timing system. There competitors carry small electronic cards with them. On the spots, they stamp the cards to the stamper. Cards immediately save the time. One emit lasts about five years. Then you'll have to buy a new one.
Some countries use SportIdent system instead of emit. SportIdents are much less reliable than emits but they are more expensive. Swedish use sportidents.
This year in swedish 25-manna-relay 93 teams of 351 teams were disqualified because of missing stampings. Their SportIdents were broken. In Finnish Halikko-relay this year 8 teams out of 143 teams were disqualified. They hadn't found the spots. For more info, check emit and sportident from wikipedia.

Jukolan viesti, one of the largest orienteering competitions in the whole world. This year (2007) it was kept in Virkiä. If you don't know where it is, it's your own problem.

A spot. (finnish: rasti.) Sometimes spots are well-hidden. This one isn't.

Finland is one of the world's toughest orienteering countries. Also Switzerland, sweden and Norway are high qualified in orienteering. Below you can see how many and wich medals did every country won in many years tai jotain sinnepäin emmävaantiiä world orienteering championship (WMOC). HYVÄ SUOMI!
This year finland was the best!

New forms of orienteering

Night orienteering
- big lights; big fun!

Ski orienteering
- orienteering in winter

Bike orienteering
- orienteering with bicycles

Accuracy orienteering
- no time limits; just check out the right spots. Very difficult. Antti rusanen won  world championship silver in this form of orientierung. He belongs to Keravan urheilijat (Kerava athletics.)

Simulator orienteering
- if you wish to try orienteering yourself, you can do it now on your own computer! Check out this place!

Orienteering simulator screenshots

By: OskaP & Wilzu

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