Nordic premiere in 1955
Right now, I have several course setting missions underway. I have already written some of Stockholm's Sprint-DM in may this year. Next year, in May 2011, I will be one of the two Course setters for the relay at the Nordic Championships, NOC 2011. We will also add tracks to an audience of races which will be held in conjunction with the NOC 2011. I will be blogging about work on the runways, terrain, map, and a lot of other things around the NOC 2011. Despite my poor knowledge of English, I will also try to translate all the blogg posts of the NOC 2011 to english so that all participants have an equal chance to receiving the same information.
I've looked a bit into the history books and found a lot of interest around the Nordic championships history. Before the premiere race had a Nordic international match arranged for a number of years. As of the 1955 championships was upgraded to a Nordic championships. Premiere competition was conducted in Kolmården and in this way described the competition in the yearbook Skärmen from 1956.
"Nordic Championship premiere took place in the legendary Kolmården. In the land that gave the vision of fairy tale land of gnomes and trolls." The map was considered a delicacy in the scale 1:50 000 and 5 meter contour interval. Mens course had a field length of 14.8 kilometers through 12 controls. Womens course was 7.9 kilometers long and contained 7 controls.
Four nations participated, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. In the men's class, it became a Swedish victory by Marthe Andersson. Sweden and Finland dominated the men's competition, and among the top 20 was just one Norwegian runner. Although the women were dominated by Sweden and Finland. Top of the podium was Finnish Ella Hanelius followed by two Swedes.
In these first Nordic championships were no relay. On the other hand it was anticipated up times for the top ten men and top six ladies. Finland won the teamcompetition for men followd by Sweden, while it was the opposite result for the women. Norway was third in both races. Denmark had too few participants to be in the team competition.
Of course there are a lot of curiosities about the competition. In the picture above this gives the pipe-smoking Norwegian teamleader Eva Voss Bendixen one of the Norwegian runners "last rites" before starting.
Already in 1955 the competition arena was important. The organizer thought it was a bit too open at the arena. They solved it by simply cutting down some birch trees, digging holes in the arena and "planting" the birches in the pits.
