The 2011 Perthshire OMM came down to a sprint-finish today. Duncan Archer and Shane Ohly, setting the fastest time of the day by 6 minutes to take the win from Chris Near and Tim Higginbottom. Doug Tullie and John Rocke finished 5 minutes down in 3rd place, a good performance considering Doug's illness earlier in the week, 4 minutes ahead of Steve Birkenshaw and Jethro Lennox.
From a brief glance at the splits (and Twitter!), Duncan and Shane appeared to run a controlled race, taking time out of Near and Higginbottom on 8 of the 11 legs (including finish) on the day 2 course. Birkenshaw and Lennox started hard with a slew of fastest split times, taking minutes out of the other 3 pairs over the first 4 controls and hitting the front of the race. However, a series of poor route choices from then on, losing 3-4 minutes to Archer and Ohly on at least 3 legs, put paid to their chances of another OMM victory.There's also talk of them punching the wrong penultimate control on day 1 (same feature and less than 100m away, tricky on a 1:40k map) for which they were penalised 30mins. More news on this if I find it.
Elsewhere, on the A-Class a 7 minute overnight lead became a 9 minute win for Peter Hodgkinson and James Taylor over Mark and Ashley Bown. Dave Schorah and Tom Beasant were again 34minutes quicker than their closest rival on the B-class, winning by the best part of 70 minutes. Andy Llewellyn and Rich Robinson showed that they really should man up, winning the C-class by 119 minutes. Alex and David McCann held onto 1st on the D-Class by 2 minutes.
Once there's some route-gadgets and training logs are up I'll post a slightly more in-depth view of proceedings. All there is to say is - Orienteers won all 5 non-score courses!
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