The Road to JWOC 2026, #1 The Junior World Orienteering Championships 2026 will be held in late June – early July in Karlskrona, Sweden. https://www.jwoc2026.se Here on the blog, I’m starting a series of posts focused on technical preparation for these championships. I’m sharing these analytical posts openly, in the hope that they will be useful to athletes preparing for the event. Let’s begin with the terrain: it features highly diverse vegetation and a great number of small details — both in terms of contours and vegetation features. An analysis of long distance courses held in this type of terrain shows that course planners often include a short first leg , sending athletes straight into detailed navigation right from the start. In the context of a peak-season competition like JWOC, such legs become even more challenging due to the psychological pressure to execute the beginning of the course as fast and as cleanly as possible. My advice to athletes is to specifically prepa...