Maybe. But LoRaWAN may not be the best fit for this task.
Localization
First of all it is not possible to localize nodes with the required accuracy with LoRaWAN alone. For that you would need to use something else, possibly Bluetooth beacons. There is a whitepaper on localization with LoRaWAN based on RSSI and RX times, but that requires at least three gateways and gives you an accuracy of maybe 100m with precise RX times which not all gateways can record with the required precision (generally only if a GPS receiver is also present and currently connected).
Latency
A communication round trip with LoRaWAN for class A devices takes between 1 and 5 seconds, because there is a fixed delay between the uplink and the downlink RX windows. This may be less than ideal for the athlete feedback (I am not familiar with Orienteering, but I would expect athletes not to linger at the checkpoints). On the other hand battery life would likely not be a concern for this application, so it may be possible to switch to class C where downlinks are always possible. Still it will take time for all the cloud based processing and the downlink to the gateway which will likely connect via GSM/3G/LTE. Also there is always some packet loss and retransmissions take time.
In the EU there is also a duty cycle restriction on the most common ISM bands around 868MHz, so larger packets may take even longer to retransmit, depending on the implementation (better implementation keep track of the duty cycle over an hour, so infrequent short "bursts" of communication are possible).
So in practice your device should decide the feedback to athletes locally, without waiting for a server connection. This also means that the beacon and/or the device would have to record the visits reliably.
Reliability
Lossless communication is not offered out of the box in the LoRaMAC implementations I know. You would have to implement a packet queue on the devices.
No Mesh
There is no built-in mesh in LoRAWAN (you can implement or adapt one yourself of course, but that goes against "ease-of-development"), but you can easily add more gateways, it is sufficient for one of them to receive the uplink packets. In a forest that is interesting for Orienteering I would expect you to need multiple gateways anyway for speedy reception. LoRaWAN works great with line of sight, but obstacles reduce the range and it will not penetrate hills. If you just want the data at the end, it would work well, but then you do not need LoRAWAN at all, so it is a tradeoff between cost and speed of data transmission once you have implemented a reliable packet queue.