By Ian Ewing
Two orienteering families have reason to be proud this month. The Ottawa Orienteering Club is the home of three of Canada’s seven athletes selected for the World Orienteering Championships (WOC) in Lausanne, Switzerland July 14-21. Locals Jeff Teutsch, Eric Kemp, and Robbie Anderson were each selected.
The Kemp family, meanwhile, has extra reason to cheer, as Eric’s younger sisters Emily and Molly were selected to the Junior National Team competing in Slovakia for the Junior World Orienteering Championship (JWOC). OOC’s Alex Bergstrom will also join the Kemp girls at JWOC.
Exceptionally popular in Scandinavia, the sport is starting to grow in Canada, with the Ottawa club at the forefront. Orienteering is an outdoor sport in which competitors race through the wilderness on unfamiliar terrain, running from one checkpoint or “control” to the next using only a detailed topographical map and a compass to guide them.
For Teutsch, his first world championships represents the achievement of a longstanding goal. After applying and being accepted to the Canadian Orienteering Federation’s High-Performance Program this year, Teutsch earned his spot on the national team based on his results at a priority race in Canmore, AB at the end of May.
“It’s been a big goal of mine to work towards being on the team for the world championships,” Teutsch highlights. “I’m very excited.”
Eric Kemp attended worlds as a junior in 2009, but will be making his first appearance as a senior, running the middle distance. The 22-year-old talks excitedly about returning to the atmosphere of a world competition.
“You’re surrounded by all these different people from different parts of the world, and all of them have been bent on this one week for the last year at least, probably more,” he describes. “You’re all together sharing the experience. It’s just wonderful.”
Euro travel required for elite
The men each left for Europe weeks ahead of WOC. After time acclimatizing and training, they are attending the World University Orienteering Championships in Spain as a tune-up before Switzerland.
Kemp joined Anderson in Sweden, the acknowledged home and heart of the sport. Anderson has been living and training there while completing his Master’s degree. He’ll be racing the sprint and long distances.
Teutsch, meanwhile, chose to train first in Austria, where he has family. The Carleton engineering graduate is expected to run the middle and long distances at WOC.
Kemp, a computer science student at Carleton, has been a member of the High-Performance Program since its inception in 2009.
He recalls the day, two years before that, when he started to get serious about orienteering. Despite being an active and outdoorsy family, he says, the Kemps were never particularly athletic. One day, however, Emily emerged from her room and announced to the family that she was going for a run.
“The concept was completely foreign to us,” Eric laughs. Soon that training began to pay off, and Emily, “two years younger and a foot shorter,” began beating her older brother. Consistently.
“After a while, I said to myself, ‘This can’t continue!’” he recalls. And now, he says, it seems odd if he doesn’t go for a run every day.
Emily is now living and training in France with the French national team. Already the holder of Canadian records for best results at JWOC with two 13th-place finishes, she’s looking to cap her final year as a junior in style.
At the French national championship this year, she won the middle distance by 10 minutes in a typically 40-minute race. The Kemps are hoping for a similar result at JWOC.
Sibling rivalry what it is, though, Eric claims he’s still faster.
“I haven’t raced directly against her in a while, but I hope I am,” he smiles.