About the races

We start with a return to New Plymouth for those who attended Oceania Sprint Championships 2024. But don’t expect an easy time on familiar maps, your bush navigation skills and climbing legs will definitely get a workout.

The Oceania 2025 sprint is at Massey University—a rolling parkland campus with just enough climb to be fun. The map has a mixture of fast open areas with complex path and stairway networks set among formal plantings and mature trees.

Like the sprint, the middle and long are World Ranking Events for the elites, and for everyone a great chance to run and compete on top quality dune maps very much worthy of a WRE. Knottingly in particular is a real treat—our mapper describes it as primo—with good visibility and minimal undergrowth broken up by a network of forestry access tracks. So expect some interesting and testing long course legs!

The relay rounds off the series at Parewanui. Pines and dunes as with the previous maps, with generally excellent runnability and complex contour detail. There is a network of twisting 4×4 and dirt-bike tracks, with different styles of forest block requiring a variety of orienteering techniques.

Oceania 2025 also includes an ANZ Challenge where orienteers from Australia and New Zealand will compete across a wide variety of ages classes. Australia currently holds both cups the teams will be competing for, but there’s everything to play for!