On December 29, as the year drew to a close and the new year approached, the 2024 Dinghai Foot Orienteering World Ranking Event kicked off officially. This event attracted over 1,700 participants, including international elite orienteers, domestic professional orienteers, and orienteering enthusiasts, gathering in Dinghai to witness and participate in this year-end event that perfectly integrated sports, culture and tourism.

It is reported that the event lasted for two days, with two competition groups: the Elite Group and the Open Group. The Elite Group was further divided into the Men's Elite Group and the Women's Elite Group; the Open Group was divided into multiple groups based on age, meeting the needs of participants of different levels and achieving full age coverage of the event.

After fierce competition among the high-level domestic and international orienteers in the Elite Group, Tomas Krivda from the Czech Republic ultimately stood out with a time of 15 minutes and 4.1 seconds, winning the short-distance Men's Group championship. Yannick Michiels from Belgium and Liu Xiaoming from China won second and third place, respectively. In the short-distance Women's Elite Group, Hao Shuangyan from China won the championship with a time of 17 minutes and 29.5 seconds. Aniko Koren from Hungary and Lone Karin Brochmann from Norway tied for second place.

Compared to last year, a major highlight of this event was the upgraded dual-event model, demonstrating the event concept of being "more open, more shared, and more city-centric." In addition to the high-standard international orienteering ranking event, the concurrently held Dinghai City Orienteering Event perfectly combined orienteering with urban exploration. It innovatively set up two themed routes: "Exploring the Ancient City" and "Fun in Dinghai." With team and family groups participating, covering people aged 6-60, it attracted enthusiastic registration from orienteering enthusiasts across the country. The event used a novel checkpoint-based format to connect multiple and diverse landmark urban attractions, such as Dinghai Ancient City, Donghai Cloud Corridor, New World Plaza, Dongshan Park, and the Opium War Memorial Park. It also integrated Dinghai's intangible cultural heritage, red culture, and maritime culture, allowing participants to enjoy the fun and sense of accomplishment of sports while also freely touring the ancient city of Dinghai, where the sea of clouds meets and the mountains and the sea reflects each other, deeply experiencing Dinghai's profound historical and cultural heritage, beautiful coastal natural scenery, and vigorous development prospects.

As the venue for this event, Dinghai, which has hosted two world-class orienteering events, has a long history and rich culture and is a famous historical and cultural coastal city. This event is not only a grand gathering showcasing the spirit of sports competition but also an opportunity to promote the high-quality development of Dinghai's sports industry. Relying on the unique characteristics of orienteering events, it fully integrates Dinghai's cultural and tourism resources to create more open service spaces, cultural consumption venues, and distinctive tourist routes, thereby promoting the deep integration of the sports industry and urban development.

In recent years, with the theme of "traveling with events," Dinghai has actively cultivated new forms of outdoor sports. It uses fashionable, green, and healthy national sports such as cycling, orienteering, hiking, and street dance as important tools for developing the sports and tourism industry, transforming event traffic into cultural tourism retention and economic growth, and promoting the diversified development of Dinghai's "sports + tourism" and "culture + tourism."