Jack Kosky and Antonija Orlic win in the end of Funchal City Race

Funchal City Race filled the city with Orienteering

Four hundred participants in the 1st Edition of the Funchal City Race orienteered throughout downtown ​​Funchal. On Saturday afternoon, the Sprint stage was set on Parque Santa Catarina, with courses that took participants to areas around Pestana Casino Park and Princess Dona Maria Amelia Foundation, proving to be a complex exercise due to the high detail of the maps and routes. In this first stage, the spotlight goes to the victory of UK athletes, Matthew Elkington (KD) in Men Elite and Sarah-Jane Barrable (SLOW) in Women.

On Sunday morning, the stage that qualified for Portugal City Race and Euro Tour City Race circuits took place, under the organization of Clube Aventura da Madeira having set up the event area throughout the downtown area between the São Tiago Fort and Parque de Santa Catarina, with starts and finish at Praça do Município. Participants were divided into 13 different courses, ranging from training to veterans over 75 years of age, with elite classes having roughly 12 kms of course for men and 8 kms for women.

The victories in the elite classes were highly disputed, particularly in the Men’s category, where the top three finishers ended with a 10-second gap using different route choices.

Elite Men

1^st          Jack Kosky                         SO (United Kingdom)                    45:27

2^nd         Matthew Elkington         KD (United Kingdom)                    45:33

3^rd          Tiago Martins Aires        CMo Funchal (Portugal)               45:37

4^th          Pavel Krasko                     Belarus (Belarus)                            47:01

5^th          Nick Barrable                   SLOW (United Kingdom)              47:44

Elite Women

1^st          Antonija Orlic                   Sprint Addicts (Croatia)                40:22

2^nd         Sarah-Jane Barrable       SLOW (United Kingdom)              41:12

3^rd          Gudrun Englmaier          Individual (Austria)                        42:25

4^th          Isabel Diz                           CORNELIUS (Spain)                        45:13

5th         Tereza Maria Rush          BOK (United Kingdom)                 46:11

The organizers from Clube Aventura da Madeira, with a team of 45 members, made a very positive assessment of the event, having received comments and praises from participants encouraging the organization for a second edition of the Funchal City Race. In this first edition, the event brought together 434 participants representing 110 clubs from 23 countries. The UK led the “entourages” with 105 athletes, followed by Norway (33), Spain (28) and Switzerland (19) gathering the majority of the 244 foreign participants and the 60 Portuguese from the mainland that came to Madeira to participate in the event, surpassing the three hundred visitors.

For the completion of the two stages of the Funchal City Race, the organization set up about 60 checkpoints, providing 13 courses on each day of competition, and 1,000 maps were printed for the two days of the event.

The closing of the event took place in Praça do Município, in a ceremony distinguished the winners of the second stage of the Funchal City Race and also the winners of the rankings from the Portugal City Race and Euro Tour City Race circuits.

Clube Aventura da Madeira hosted the event with partners such as Funchal City Hall, Madeira Tourism, the Regional Board for Youth and Sports, the Madeira Association for Sport for All, the Portuguese Orienteering Federation, the Portuguese Association for the Promotion of Madeira, University of Madeira, Blandy’s Madeira, Manica – Digital Solutions, RGB-Image, Coca-Cola European Partners, Pestana Casino Park, Bordal and Dona Maria José.

All results at: http://www.funchalcityrace.com/results/results/