World of O News
After a webTV production with great potential from the mixed relay on Thursday, the long distance mass start on the program for the ski-orienteers in Tänndalen, Sweden today. According to the reports there should be live GPS tracking, live web-TV and live results from the race. The start has been delayed two hours due to snow and wind conditions – the women will start at 12:00 CET and the men at 12:20 CET.
I will be following the event through a LiveBlog here at World of O (as long as the GPS-tracking and webTV works) – I hope some of you will join in on the fun.
- Live GPS Tracking
- Live web-TV
- Map/GPS Tracking from Ski WOC Middle Men Part 1, Men part 2
- O-Route Challenge from Ski WOC Sprint
Info from earlier events
Some preview videos and other information from earlier in the Ski WOC week are included below.
Ski WOC 2011: Middle winners from SkiOTour Club on Vimeo.
Ski WOC 2011: Sprint winners from SkiOTour Club on Vimeo.
Program
- Tuesday March 22nd. Sprint, 10:00 CET
- Wednesday March 23rd. Middle, 10:00 CET
- Thursday March 24th. Mixed relay 15:00 CET (2 skiers on each team, 3 times per skier)
- Saturday March 26th. Long
10:0012:00 CET - Sunday Match 27th. Relay 10:00 CET
After watching the mass start from the Ski WOC today, I must say I am VERY happy that the WIF project group decided to not have mass start on their suggested WOC program. This was MUCH to complicated to follow, even for an orienteer. One should never have a mass start with this type of forking system if the goal is that to show the sport to the spectators (for the skiers I guess it is fine). The forking system made it very difficult to understand who was in the lead, what was the next control, etc. Even the speaker had no idea what was happening – and it was difficult to see where the decisive moments where. The key to a good TV production is that the viewer know more than the athlete – here it was definitely the other way around.
However: The last 15-20 minutes of the race it was possible to know what happened – and the last 15 minutes of the mens race was a real thriller – very good TV! In this part of the race, the head-cam video worked extremely well – one could really see what was happening there. Unfortunately there was no GPS-tracking for Staffan Tunis – one of the athletes fighting for gold, but still it was great to watch. Unfortunately I think quite a few lost interest a long time before that – it was afterall 1 hour 40 minutes of racing.