IOF has an intense focus to constantly improve the quality and fairness for our World Championships and World Cups. With that purpose in mind, 75 event organisers and Senior Event Advisers from 22 countries met in Budapest, Hungary during the previous weekend for the annual High Level Event Seminar for Foot Orienteering. The aim is for the participants to inspire each other by exchanging experiences and strengthening the network between organisers.
The WOC organisers from 2024 in Edinburgh shared their experience from organising a successful sprint event in one of the most touristic cities in the world. Up to 200 volunteers were involved in securing the courses for the athletes. Then IOF CEO, Henrik Eliasson used examples from events in 2024 to highlight how all the details of an arena can work together to form an excellent venue for athletes, spectators as well as organisers.
The time after lunch was spent in three split sessions. Event Directors discussed how to manage and secure finances for events and shared experience from event organising through a panel discussion. In the sprint session, a newly developed proposal for guidelines about how to manage pushing and blocking the way in Knock-Out Sprint was discussed. The participants also discussed the future of the Knock-Out Sprint in general as well as some more nitty-gritty details about how to set good courses in sprint. The third session was about forest orienteering. There it was the time to go into more details with calculation of winning times, courses and maps for forest races. The major feedback from these split sessions were that the participants would have liked to listen to other sessions as well.
The first day ended with the highlight of the weekend. Athletes and coaches are the key stakeholders of our sport and this year, French head coach Charly Boichut took time to come and give a detailed presentation on how teams prepare and what organisers can do to optimise the athlete experience. Several participants mentioned this talk to be the highlight of the week.
After a long night of intense networking, meeting and discussions, the participants could start the Sunday by running a sprint course in the nearby Városliget Park to freshen up their head before the day’s program started. In a session about how to make our events TV-friendly, four groups then discussed how the course they had just run could be the base for a fictive event with TV-broadcast. Another 5 groups discussed how Middle and Long distance events could be made TV-friendly in another fictive event – this time with the theoretical arena placed by the entrance to the iconic Hammershus Castle Ruin in the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm.
IOF Council member Blair Trewin, who is in his professional life a climate scientist, then brought perspective to how orienteering will need to take more extreme weather into account in the planning of future events. Event Director Ádám Lengyel than explained how the heat had been mitigated in WMOC 2021 and EOC 2024 and Event Director Josep Santiago finally told about the actions to mitigate for possible heat in WMOC 2025 by having arenas in the shade, higher altitude for some races and proximity to the sea in others along with other measures.
The participants gave very positive feedback after the seminar and mentioned it had provided inspiration to go home with inspiration and energy to make an even greater effort to deliver outstanding events in 2025 and beyond.
The presentations from the seminar can be found on this link. The IOF High Level Seminar will take place again in 2026 around the same time of year. The invitation will be available in the last months of 2025.
Photos: The Hungarian Orienteering Federation TV crew who were on site.