Orienteering Ottawa to welcome tight-knit community for Aug. 10-11 North American Championships

By Kaitlyn LeBoutillier

There will be top competition when Orienteering Ottawa hosts the North American Championships on Aug. 10-11 at Calabogie, but for athletes and organizers of the final leg of the Canadian Orienteering Festival, the event is just as much about bringing together the sport’s close-knit community.

“My greatest friends are from [orienteering],” signals Philipe Turcanu, a member of Orienteering Ottawa and Team Canada.

“I think that kind of niche-ness of it is definitely something that keeps people in the sport,” concurs Orienteering Ottawa’s Tom Graham, the national junior team coach. ”You’re close with everybody and you make friends that live on the other side of the country.”

Both Turcanu and Graham have been orienteering “since they could walk” and were each inspired by their parents to pick up the sport.

“My dad and my mom used to do these 48-hour adventure races,” Turcanu recounts.

“They were looking to actually start learning how to navigate better and they started by joining Orienteering Ottawa, then they ended up introducing it to me and my older brother, but it stuck to me more so than my older brother.”

Turcanu, along with his brother Victor, was previously a standout paddler with the Ottawa River Canoe Club.

He was a 2017 Canada Games canoe medallist and competed in the world junior championships.

Turcanu was also a top runner for Bell High School, including a fourth-place finish at the OFSAA high school cross-country running championships.

The 2022 national long distance bronze medallist now one of Orienteering Ottawa’s top athletes alongside Graham’s brother Robert, who also hit the Canadian orienteering podium in 2022 with bronze in middle distance.

Ottawa’s Emily Kemp, who became the first North American to win a medal at the world junior championships in 2012, remains a star on the women’s side and was a national champion last year.

Each stage of the Canadian Orienteering Festival features different types of races. The Canadian Championships middle and long distance races will be held north of Toronto in Mansfield on Aug. 3-4, the North American Sprint Championships are in Kingston Aug. 6-8 and then come the North American middle and long distance races at Calabogie.

Turcanu plans to compete in virtually every event.

The aggressive “guns-a-blazing” middle distance event, as Turcanu describes it, along with the long distance competition, are usually held in forested areas, while the sprint, relay, and knockout sprints are held in more urban areas, like this year’s at Queen’s University and the Kingston Penitentiary grounds.

Turcanu remembers a “really cool” World Championships event held in a castle in Europe.

Graham also spent time racing across Europe – the sport’s hotbed, particularly in Scandinavia – and competed for the junior national team, which he now coaches, with guidance from Orienteering Canada head coach and high-performance director Jeff Teutsch of Ottawa.

Graham still races on occasion, though his main focus is now on helping to build the sport in Ottawa and Canada. The Ottawa club offers youth programs, including eight-week introductions with games, activities, short courses and small tournaments.

“Orienteering is, I think by nature, a very community-oriented sport, very family-oriented,” highlights Graham. “Like many other parents at the orienteering club, [my parents] would bring my brother and me along anytime they went to our weekly events.

“Both my parents were avid orienteers and they were both competing at the national level.”

Orienteering Ottawa also organizes outreach events with schools and local groups such as cadets and scouts to share the skills of orienteering and promote it as a sport.

“Ottawa has really made an effort over the past basically 15 years of making sure that we have that consistency of events, both for regular club members and for newcomers,” Graham indicates. “That’s what’s going to make any sports club thrive. It’s about commitment and I think that’s where Ottawa has really shone – just sticking with it and making an effort to always have something going on.”

Hosting major events like the Canadian or North American championships, which Orienteering Ottawa has done previously in 2010, 2014 and 2017, is “very exciting,” Graham adds.

“Ottawa has always been very keen on giving other clubs the chance to host as well as definitely going all-out anytime we want to host something like this,” says Graham, noting the championships include age group divisions as well as less competitive events open to all-comers.

“Having it so close to home, it makes it so much easier, so much more accessible,” Turcanu underlines.

For Graham, the transition from racing to running programming and then coaching at a high level has been a new experience, but the key has been being open to learning, he explains.

“[It was quite a] jump from coaching kids who don’t even know what orienteering is to suddenly this year, we were in the Czech Republic and I had at least two athletes who had been to at least a few championship events before that,” Graham notes, while adding that maintaining a supportive family kind of relationship is important at all levels of coaching.

“To be that centre for the athletes, just being someone to not only give competitive advice but also just being someone to listen to if they need to vent or being kind of just the reliable adults,” he smiles.

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