Comments on: KnockOut by Klingenberg and Kyburz

By: Jan Kocbach

Jan Kocbach — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:57:40 +0000

Thanks for good input! Shorter routechoice legs sounds like a good idea – but it might be more difficult to adapt to TV both due to camera range and poorer GPS tracking performance.

However, I agree that more technical challenges = more is happening = more interesting for both viewers and runners…

By: Tuomo Mäkelä

Tuomo Mäkelä — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 06:54:51 +0000

I run yesterday in semifinals and performed really badly. I haven’t been a great fun of knock out sprint and this time didn’t change that. Although I think it was partly knock out middle distance. If it’s supposed to be sprint, control points should be easier.

The best knock out sprint is the race, where both running (well) in the front and orienteering well are rewarded. Tactics with following others and speeding up in the end should be made more difficult to implement successfully. More important it is to be in the front more aggressive and interesting is the race. I think eight men is good amount of runners in the heat as well as two punching units. It makes it more important to be near the front.

Courses should be both technical and include route choices. If there are lots of corners and some narrow passages, it’s more important to be near the front. Technical courses also increase possibility to do orienteering errors. If there is made mistake in the front, those who orienteer carefully benefit. If there are route choices, then it’s possible to try own choice.

The easiest way to do such a course is to use many controls. If there are long route choice legs, then there are usually technically easy parts where physically strongest runners are able to come in the front. It’s better to have multiple shorter route choice legs. I think that end part of semifinals was way too easy. If runners were together by the railway bridge, the strongest runners found their way in the front quite easily and by orienteering well you couldn’t win many seconds.

We ran a knock out sprint in Finland’s NORT qualifications. I think those courses were the best knock out sprint course I have seen so far. Situation during races was chancing quite a lot and many different route choices were taken. Courses can be found: http://www.jrv.fi/kisaharveli/cgi-bin/reitti.cgi?act=map&id=2&kieli= and http://www.jrv.fi/kisaharveli/cgi-bin/reitti.cgi?act=map&id=4&kieli=

I think if a course is good, forking is not needed.

By: Vinogradov Mike

Vinogradov Mike — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:40:48 +0000

Hi! What was the reason to remove one stage (1/4 final) and increase number of runners (from 6 to 8)??

In my opinion it creates a real mass (especially during first punching and in case of narrow passages).

Route choices was nice. In case of good route choices we don’t need to create forking, because strong runners just will be easy spread out in these situations.

By: Samo

Samo — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:43:13 +0000

I didn’t know that but I was thinking more about what should be the default option. I think the option without names, only dots as default option might be better because you already have names in the right corner. And if I would be interested to know who is who I would like to know that only 2-3s after each CP.With real split times window inside the GPS tracking window this could be good for someone who is able to watch only GPS tracking.

From GPS dots I thought that Tranchand won the race.