Maria Sá

Disappointing is the right world to qualify this woc 2007 for me.The terrain where we compete was completly differrent from what I expected. After 2months of trainning at portuguese forests I got completly shocked with the terrain in ukraine. So green area but so white in the map.The middle qualification was a good example of this.The terrain was very diffuse with much vegetation, and I had problems to hold the right direction in to the controls. I had hoped the terrain should be faster with better visibility, like the terrains I have trained in Portugal.
The sprint qualification went very bad and i did not qualified for the final.I did several mistakes at around 30 seconds each on the final part of the race, and came on 23th place in my heat, 4 minutes behind the winner Simone Niggli.
The long qualification was very though and the terrain was completly different from what I expected. I did really bad result and was very sad and disappointed with my race.
Beside that it was an interesting championship because travelling by bus, metro and bus again for the competitions was very challeging! Interesting too was to see a lot of top atletes with stomach problems and who were the ones that could resiste to so hard conditions...congratulations Tomas:up: