Course Setter's Statement

This year's Halikko Relay will be run in a virtually new orienteering terrain. Although the area has perhaps remained unmapped over the years due to its somewhat remote location, it is in fact excellent and versatile from an orienteering point of view. Forestry has of course been practiced in the area, but the best hilly sections are in excellent condition for orienteering.

Ari Salonen has made a clear and readable map, whose mapping style aligns well with current professional Finnish standards.

The day opens with the Children's Halikko Run, designed to correspond to the technical difficulty level of the 12 class. The participants will once again form a diverse group, and the course aims to offer more challenging route choices for the more experienced orienteers and safer alternative routes for younger or less experienced runners.

The children's course partly uses forest machine tracks, which are also visible in one of the samples. The tracks are quite comprehensively marked on the map, but it is good to remind the youngest orienteers that some weaker tracks have also been left out of the map.

In defining the difficulty levels for the Halikko Relay, the event has adopted the federation's technical difficulty color scale. Legs 1, 2, 4, and 5 are all violet, corresponding to the technical difficulty level of the 16 class.

I interpret the federation's guidelines to mean that in Southwest Finnish terrain, demanding yet pleasant orienteering tasks remain within the defined technical level boundaries. Legs 1 and 4 contain somewhat more long-distance orienteering elements, while legs 2 and 5 offer pure middle-distance orienteering.

The last two relay legs are defined as blue in difficulty. In practice, the difference in overall challenge compared to the previously mentioned legs is small, but these legs provide a broader test of competitors' skills.

This year, the control codes could not be placed next to the control numbers on the map due to space limitations. I warmly remind everyone that the course setter's goal is to tempt competitors into taking the wrong forking. The codes can be found in the control descriptions printed in the corner of the map.

Good luck in the competition!

Tuomo Mäkelä
Course Setter