Graham & Val kick off their Summer Tour in Belgium
This was our fifth time competing in the Belgian Urban ASOM competition (‘A’ stands for Antwerp), held at varying times of the year in a Belgian city and comprising at least three events – a double sprint, an Urban and a mixed relay – although, this year, it being a Belgian holiday, there were four. After two visits to Antwerp, one to Ostend and Ghent, it was Leuven’s turn in 2024.
To my shame, I was previously aware of Leuven, but, beyond that, I had to look up where it was on the map (north-east of Brussels). It is, in fact, Belgium’s tenth largest city and well worth a visit in its own right. Other gratuitous Leuven facts include:
- Adeliza of Leuven was the second wife of Henry I between 1121 and 1135;
- The Big Bang theory was formulated by Georges Lemaitre at Leuven University in 1931;
- The exterior of Leuven’s Town Hall displays 235 statues, of which only 12 are women. There used to be 236, but King Leopold disappeared thanks to his links to slavery.
- Leuven is the headquarters of the largest beer producer in the world (Anheuser-Busch InBev) and Stella Artois is brewed in vast quantities not far from the train station.
At least one of those facts was interesting.
All five of the events took place within the city’s ring road, and all of them were top quality. For some reason the narrow, non-linear, often mediaeval streets of Belgian cities make ideal venues for urban orienteering. It’s almost as if the city planners bore this in mind when plotting the layouts of their cities centuries ago.
DVO was represented by two Johnsons, two Godfrees and one Calland, but the whole British contingent probably represented about 10% of the competition and was the largest of the 22 nationalities represented.
Friday
The first event on the Friday night was a throwaway warm-up event; you might have expected this to have been reflected in the quality of the area but not a bit of it. I’d say the event, in terms of challenge was superior to most British urban events, even those carrying prestige. As is almost invariably the case, the event centre was the courtyard of a local school on the edge of an area known as the ‘Bequinage of Leuven’, formerly a community of religious women dating originally from the 13thC. It comprised a series of alleys, courtyards, gardens and parks and incorporated dozens of houses and convents built from traditional sandstone. The photo of me above gives a flavour of it.
The event took place in torrential rain, which Val kindly agreed to illustrate by finishing in a suitably bedraggled state. As can be seen from the map and course, virtually every leg presented a genuine head-scratching route choice.
The school in fact served as event HQ for this prologue, the sprints and the Urban, and the three entrances provided opportunities for finishes from three different directions, avoiding the problems of courses covering the same ground as on previous days (see how I carefully avoided mentioning Days 2 and 3 of the JK here).
Saturday
The Sprints took us to the north of the school. No matter which area of Leuven was selected, there was always a multiplicity of parks, gardens, buildings and estates of endless variety to keep you on your toes. The first Sprint took me at one point into what looked like an indoor car park. The control was at the bottom of a flight of the stairs leading down from my level, surrounded on two sides, according to the map, by an uncrossable wall. I could see no sign of one of the walls as I headed towards the stairs and it was only very late that I realised that there was in fact no wall at all, only a two-metre drop over a vertical edge! I pulled up just in time before my weekend ended rather abruptly. There must be a better way of mapping this, but perhaps the better solution might be not to use a dangerous control site like this at all!
I finished to find that I’d actually had a good run, finding myself in third place, only 19 seconds down on Gavin Clegg. I’m sure I’m no different from every regular orienteer in that there are some runners I like to think I have a reasonable chance of beating and there are some runners I have no chance of beating, even in my wildest dreams. Gavin Clegg falls into the second category; perhaps he’d had a bad run but I’ll still take that.
Could I go one better in the second Sprint? Of course not! Last year, I found myself in a similar position in Ghent and blew the second part on the first control, getting lost on the way to it and then mispunching. Marx was wrong when he said that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. There was no tragedy, just farce, as I did exactly the same thing all over again – got lost on the way to the first control and then mispunched. The way to the first control split, and all I had to do was to take the left-hand route, but instead I chose the right. It was unforgivable.
Orienteering is a cruel and unforgiving mistress. Not sure what that means, but it’s true.
Sunday
The Sunday Urban is always one of the Eurocity races. Being chosen as a Eurocity venue is not necessarily a guarantee of quality (cough – Salford), but this cannot be said of any Belgian city, at least not from the evidence of what I’ve seen and experienced so far.
As you can see from the map, Leuven has several pockets of varied orienteering challenges, most of these being in the south of the map so, unusually, the need to restrict distance for Hypervets did not mean any reduction in quality. The 7.3km planned for Ultravets allowed a diversion into the north of the map through an array of irregular streets. My route took me through the main square of Leuven, the chief feature of which is a sculpture of a dead upside-down fly skewered on top of a flagpole (see photo)!
However this was Run 4 in three days, 8km of running for a 7.3km course, and this was beginning to take its toll by the end. This coincided with some fiendish planning between Controls 26 and 29. 26-27 involving a gloomy descent into a cavernous sequence of tortuous staircases before a quick and straightforward completion of the sequence to 28. Then Control 29 required a choice: either a retracing of steps (literally) back up the spiralling stairs or through a nearby garden and a similar ascent to the control. I should have taken the second choice, particularly as I’d come down this way on Friday (the only time we passed over the same ground all weekend), but instead I inexplicably trudged up the steps again.
These and other mistakes towards the end found me in 11th place out of 43, but other DVO types fared better: Liz was her customary 1st in WHV, Mike 4th in MHV, Val 4th in WUV and Sally 10th in WVets. Not a bad showing; we didn’t let DVO down (see header image at the top of this post). Full results for the City Race here.
I think it was after this event that Mike experienced his wardrobe malfunction. He’d recently bought a new pair of shoes. He could easily get his trousers over his old pair of shoes, and he assumed that he’d be able to do the same with the new. He was wrong. The problem was that, having tried to work the bottom of his trousers over the heel of the shoe, he could neither complete the manoeuvre not reverse it. He was stuck in a terrible halfway predicament. Of course this immediately attracted a knot of friendly and well-meaning advice, most of which was useless. The stalemate seemed to drag on interminably and at one point I wondered whether the fire brigade would have to be called. Fortunately Mike did eventually achieve what at one time seemed impossible, and further embarrassment was saved (until now).
Next year, WOC will be held in Hasselt in East Belgium at the end of August and there will be an opportunity for spectators to orienteer in another three Belgian cities.
Monday
The traditional opening to the ASOM event is a mixed relay, each pair running two legs. This was transferred to the last day this year and had a different assembly, to the north of the city centre. The event centre had two chief features: firstly its location was at the top of what was probably the only hill in Leuven whose gradient peaked at 1 in 14, a statistic which I can personally confirm as accurate, having struggled up it on a fully-laden bike before even thinking about running.
Secondly, the assembly, changeover and most of the controls were within the grounds of a(nother!) secondary school specialising in horticulture. From an orienteering point of view, this meant a dense, network of flower/veg beds, fruit trees, greenhouses and even vines as control sites. The need to make maximum use of these features meant the changeover and finish were squeezed into an area the size of the average back garden.
I hate going first on a relay. If I’m going to make mistakes, and I invariably do, particularly in relays, I’d rather make them in my own time, thank you very much, rather than have them forced on me as part of a frantic mêlée of orienteers, all desperate to register their first control before anybody else. Although there’s no rule that the male half of the relay team has to go first, convention seems to dictate that this courtesy be observed, so I had no choice.
True to form and expectations, I could initially make neither head nor tail of the map and ended up finding myself in front of control No. 2 before No. 1. The map extract featured shows Part 3, i.e. my second having taken over from Val, and this gives a good idea of the haphazard pattern of controls within the school grounds. An attention to the detail paid dividends, and Part 3 probably shows off the best bits of the whole area. However, in the longer Part 1, the school took up only a third of the map and getting the best out of the rest of it unfortunately involved 400 metres of dead running along the side of a road.
The only other gripe I would have is with the way the mixed relay formula splits everyone into three broad age groups, the oldest one of which starts at 55. This meant that Val and I were running against runners 10–14 years younger than us, more in the case of Mike and Liz (the former pointing out that the total age gap in their case was potentially 41 years!). There were enough aged people taking part to justify a split at 65 or 70 – and who knows many more M/W 65+s, put off by the age gap as it currently exists, would be attracted to enter, swelling the numbers?
My third leg covered much the same (school) ground as the first, with an added excursion into an adjoining park, which I minded not a bit. The novelty of horticultural orienteering did not wear off. However a curious piece of irrational conduct on my part occurred as I was finishing my second leg, which, even now, I am at a loss to explain. I was sprinting, or doing my best impression of such, towards the changeover line, and an eagerly waiting Val was in view, when out of the corner of my eye, I sighted the Finish control in the adjoining lane. Something deep and primordial stirred suddenly within me. Decades of ending a run by punching the Finish control triggered an irresistible urge to do the same again, and, to the astonishment of particularly the lady immediately behind me across whose path I suddenly lurched, I left the changeover lane, transgressed into the finish lane and triumphantly punched the Finish control [the Belgians need a ‘Fork Monitor’ here à la JK Relays]. It was only then that it dawned on me that this was definitely what I shouldn’t have done.
Fortunately, Val saw the funny side, laughing off the incident as she seized hold of our dibber and set about her fourth leg, despite there being every expectation that it would be meaningless. (No, that’s not what happened.)
As things turned out, despite my moan about the age split and my best efforts to sabotage our team effort, Val’s second leg was allowed to count and we ended up sixth. I still don’t know how, given what happened.
We left the event in renewed wonder at the apparently limitless supply of Belgian cities available for 3 or 4 days of quality orienteering. Next year, ASOM takes a further dive into the unfamiliar (to the ignorant foreigner anyway) by selecting for ASOM the city of Turnhout (Belgium’s 37th most populous!), 40-odd km to the NE of Antwerp.
Turnhout Fact: it’s the world’s largest producer of playing cards (feel free to drop this into the conversation next time it lags).
Try keeping me away.
