Review of DVO’s 2025 events

Dave Nevell – our statistician, now based in north Wales – looks back on last year’s events

2025 saw the DVO fixture list settling into what is perhaps a new paradigm for orienteering, namely a small number of conventional urban and forest events, considerably boosted by a lot of urban MapRuns, mainly but not exclusively at night. This has been such a large shift that it could well be argued that it is “the third great revolution in orienteering development” following the emergence of custom drawn maps in the early 1970s and the advent of electronic timing at the turn of the century. The ability to plan events quickly, almost anywhere and with little manpower may turn out to be the saviour of the sport. We shall see.

Here is a summary of 2025’s activity. 2024 figures are in brackets.

The total number of events over the year (35)  was one more than in 2024. It should be noted that there was even more MapRun activity than indicated here because Chris put on another 6 introductory events aimed at specific running groups. However these have not been included in this list because they were not registered as events, were not  widely advertised and didn’t have any results. So, along with 4 other Mapactive events, these have all been treated as just training. The last time DVO had this many events in one year was in 2017 when summer evening events boosted the numbers.

As far as I can tell, 28 different areas were used throughout the year. I think counting Ockbrook as a different (or new) area is a little tenuous as it used the same map as a Spondon map but just with a start/finish in Ockbrook. Other than that, Breadsall Hilltop, Belper Parks, Alvaston, Eyes Meadow and Chellaston all appear to be new areas, by map title if nothing else. My estimate is that DVO has now used 142 differently named areas for orienteering. Somebody awakening from a 30 year coma would be very confused by this indeed.

The total number of events has now risen to an estimated 1090 over a period of just exceeding 57 years. I speculated a year ago about which DVO member may have attended the most. John Hurley (caught on camera at the end of this post) offered a figure of 114 Level C (and above) events up to March 2025 at which point I estimate 374 had been staged. That’s the standard if anyone wants to try to beat it.

There were 2892 attendees over the year which was down by 834 on 2024 but of course that year was boosted considerably by having over 1000 at the JK Relays on Stanton Moor.  This has brought the running total up to an estimated 165266.  The average attendance was 83, almost identical to 2024 if the JK is excluded. As usual it is more informative to look at the average attendances by event level. Level D is a catchall for anything below Level C. These were (2024 in brackets):

The highest turnout of the year was not surprisingly the Midland Champs on Chinley Churn which drew 441 competitors. This is almost exactly half the number that attended the 2019 British Middle Champs on the same area but is otherwise the next highest Chinley turnout. The highest Level C turnout was 271 at Carsington Pastures in June. The Maprun event with the highest turnout was the final one of the Spring Series at Spondon in April which had 64 entries, thus making Spondon the most attractive orienteering MapRun venue for two years in a row (I can hardly believe I am typing this!). The minimum was 21 at Derby North in September. There were a lot of Thursday events, 18 in all. There were no Friday or Tuesday events in 2025 and only 5 on a Sunday. The Carsington event in June was the first Sunday event in 8 months, making it the biggest gap between Sundays (traditionally when almost all events were once held) in the history of DVO apart from the 14 month gap in 2020/21 imposed by COVID.

What else?  We ought to mention Sal’s Dracula in Derby event of 12^th April as probably DVO’s most unusual reason ever to hold an orienteering event. It was one of those rare years when Allestree Park did not stage an event but at 72 events it is still well clear of Cromford Moor (55 events) as the most used DVO area.  In fact, the November event at Cromford was the first there for three and a half years. Belper is the most frequently used urban area at 14 times going all the way back to 1977.  I said last time that up to the end of 2024 DVO had held events on 331 different days of the year, including 29^th February. Three new dates were added in 2025, namely 13^th March, 9^th August and 27^th August. That was the year that was.