Simone Niggli-Luder

Simone Niggli-Luder is a Swiss orienteer, born in 1978 and raised as Simone Luder in Burgdorf in the Canton of Bern, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest competitors the sport has produced. Orienteering asks an athlete to navigate a course of control points with map and compass at running speed, and she began competing as a child, joining the Swiss club OLV Hindelbank and entering her first competition at the age of ten. Her record is exceptional in its depth: a junior world championship gold in 1997, twenty Swiss titles, nine Swedish titles, seven European championship golds, five World Cup overall wins, more than sixty World Cup race victories and a total of 23 gold medals at world championships. In 2003 at Rapperswil in Switzerland, and again in 2005 in Aichi, Japan, she won all four women's events at the world championships, the sprint, middle and long distances and the relay. She took breaks from competition to have children in 2008 and 2011, returned to win further world titles, and announced her retirement from elite orienteering in September 2013. She studied biology at the University of Bern and later lived partly in Sweden, running for the Swedish club Ulricehamns OK.