Birmingham Euro City Race

July 13, 1900 Harlequins Orienteering

The 19th June 2022 saw Birmingham City Centre host 400 orienteers from all over the UK and much further afield. It was the culmination of years of hard work, but well worth waiting for! Great courses, great atmosphere – urban orienteering at its best, captured here on Andy Johnson’s flickr photos.

The results in assorted formats:

Organiser Lesley’s comments

Planner Dave’s perspective

The background

It seemed like such a good idea. Our neighbouring club, Octavian Droobers had successfully bid for a Euro City Tour weekend in Coventry for 2021, coinciding with Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture. 2022 would see the Commonwealth Games come to Birmingham; what better excuse to bring the Euro City Tour to a city centre new to “proper” Urban orienteering, and freshly spruced up for the occasion?

There had been several low key events in Birmingham City Centre using simplified mapping, but no ISSOM map. Together with COBOC, we agreed to fund a paid mapper to produce a base map, with Alison Sloman very kindly offering to tweak and update all the inevitable changes. This was to prove a major undertaking. We planned to hold a level C event in 2020 to both establish a relationship with Birmingham City Council’s city centre management and to prove the map. Some of the prime canal areas would be reserved for 2022. A team was assembled, with Andy Yeates (WCH) agreeing to co-ordinate the 2022 weekend. This would need at least one supporting event, hopefully using Birmingham University but with a potential eveneing event in Sutton Park too. For this undertaking HOC and COBOC would need support from our neighbours in OD and WCH.

The permission gathering and course planning for 2020 were well underway when Covid19 struck. Absolutely everything was up in the air again, and the 2022 event became a double header with the postponed 2021 Coventry Euro City event. Time for a complete rethink, with many more twists and turns along the way.

When the long awaited day arrived it was a triumph. I hope all involved thought it was worth the literally countless hours of effort that went into it; it was an honour to stand at the finish listening to all the positive comments about the courses, the event and about Birmingham itself.