Eef van Dongen (born 1993) is a Dutch orienteering competitor. She received a bronze medal at the first ever knock-out sprint event at the

2022 World Orienteering Championships The 2022 World Orienteering Championships were held from 26 to 30 June 2022 in the Triangle Region, Denmark. This was the first World Orienteering Championships with only sprint races, and the first to include a knock-out sprint event. Schedul ...

, behind

Tove Alexandersson Tove Alexandersson (born 7 September 1992) is a Swedish orienteer, ski orienteer, skyrunner and ski mountaineer. She has won a total of 17 gold medals at the World Orienteering Championships and 10 gold medals at the World Ski Orienteering Champ ...

and

Megan Carter Davies Megan Carter-Davies (born 1996) is a British orienteering competitor. She became sprint world champion at the 2022 World Orienteering Championships. This made her only the third British athlete to become world champion in an individual disciplin ...

. On club level, van Dongen competes for both Västerviks OK (in Sweden) and OLifant (in the Netherlands). Van Dongen is the first Dutch orienteer to receive a medal in the World Championships; the Netherlands has low participation in orienteering, with only 450 registered members as of 2022. In an interview in the lead up to the

2022 World Games The 2022 World Games were an international multi-sport event held from July 7 to 17, 2022, in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. They were the 11th World Games, a multi-sport event featuring disciplines of Olympic sports and other competitions ...

, van Dongen indicated that she only started

orienteering Orienteering is a group of sports that require navigational skills using a map and compass to navigate from point to point in diverse and usually unfamiliar terrain whilst moving at speed. Participants are given a topographical map, usually a s ...

in 2018 after meeting her partner, Simon Jakobsson. She attended a training camp in

Zürich Zürich () is the list of cities in Switzerland, largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zürich. It is located in north-central Switzerland, at the northwestern tip of Lake Zürich. As of January 2020, the municipality has 43 ...

in spring 2018, and decided to focus on sprint orienteering. Having run less than 10 sprint races, van Dongen attended her first

World Orienteering Championships The World Orienteering Championships (or WOC for short) is an annual orienteering event organized by the International Orienteering Federation. The first World Championships was held in Fiskars, Finland in 1966. They were held biennially up to 20 ...

2021 File:2021 collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: the James Webb Space Telescope was launched in 2021; Protesters in Yangon, Myanmar following the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état, coup d'état; A civil demonstration against the October–November 2021 ...

. As a child, Eef van Dongen participated in

volleyball Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team's court under organized rules. It has been a part of the official program of the Summ ...

and

judo is an unarmed gendai budō, modern Japanese martial art, Olympic sport (since 1964), and the most prominent form of jacket wrestling competed internationally.『日本大百科全書』電子版【柔道】(CD-ROM version of Encyclopedia Nipponi ...

, and more recently has been involved in endurance running and skating. She works as a researcher in

glaciology Glaciology (; ) is the scientific study of glaciers, or more generally ice and natural phenomena that involve ice. Glaciology is an interdisciplinary Earth science that integrates geophysics, geology, physical geography, geomorphology, climato ...

at the University of Stockholm, and as a modeler at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:van Dongen, Eef 1993 births Living people Female orienteers Foot orienteers World Orienteering Championships medalists 21st-century Dutch women 21st-century Dutch people