Congratulations to Tove Alexandersson, IWGA Team of the Month for February 2015. The 22-year-old Swedish orienteer won the individual Sprint at the World Ski Orienteering Championships in Norway and took a gold medal in the Women’s Relay too.
Her Ski Orienteering results have put her in first place in the IOF’s Ski Orienteering World Rankings, and this is the first time ever that an athlete has achieved top position in both the Orienteering and Ski Orienteering Rankings at the same time. Yes, she is as competitive and successful on skis as on foot! “Currently the fastest woman runner in the orienteering world” is the description given in Tove’s profile on the prestigious orienteering website worldofo.com.
Tove Alexandersson – winner of the middle-distance silver medal at The World Games 2013 in Cali - has just completed a quite remarkable two months in her orienteering life. The period started with three weeks spent in Tasmania, Australia, the venue for the first round of the 2015 Orienteering World Cup, a series consisting of four rounds with eleven competitions in all. Here, Tove won all three World Cup races, showing her superior skills and physical speed in the three individual formats: Sprint, Middle Distance and Long Distance.
This emphatic success, linked with a string of good results in 2014 including overall victory in the 2014 World Cup, has put her at the very top of the International Orienteering Federation’s World Rankings in Orienteering.
Tove then travelled from summer in Tasmania straight to the snowy mountains of Switzerland, where she donned her skis and pulled off a Women’s Relay gold medal and an individual silver medal in the European Ski Orienteering Championships. After Switzerland, she had a short break before Norway beckoned for this year’s World Ski Orienteering Championships held in mid-February. Here she won the individual Sprint by a margin of 48 seconds, a huge margin for a Sprint race.
Tove’s key ambition for the coming summer is to win at least one gold medal at the World Orienteering Championships to be held in Scotland at the beginning of August. World Champion status in Orienteering at senior level has eluded her so far. “My plan is to train as much and as hard as I can, continue skiing as long as it is possible and train in relevant terrain for Scotland,” she says. “I will prepare for all formats and do what I can to be the best.”
When her technical performance is 100%, no-one can beat her. And it could be quite some time before another woman orienteer is in a position to challenge this assertion – both in orienteering and in ski orienteering. “
Learn more about Tove Alexandersson on The World Games Channel.
