Comments on: Imatra Mixed Sprint Relay: Maps and Results

By: Neil

Neil — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 13:00:56 +0000

It did look fun and cool. And it is better than a sprint in Imatra without fences.

I think the issue is about the essence of orienteering. We are supposed to seek out good terrain, exciting places to orienteer. These can be Italian villages perched on hills or wild Irish mountains, whatever. WOC should represent this essence.

For challenge, we do contour only, corridor, window, indoor micro-sprints, et cetera. These exercises may make navigation more intense, but don’t belong in World Championships.

Jukola represents the best there is, in various ways. I believe this weekend’s races will be more inspirational for runners and (TV and arena) spectators alike.

The big question for me is why Finland would want to hold WC sprint races in the first place.

By: Silje

Silje — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 09:10:47 +0000

A short comment about fences and the sprint relay in Finland:
I really enjoyed running the sprint finale on Wednesday, but I think it was too many fences especially on the long legs. The routes got so complex that I was happy just to find one way through the fences and hedges at all, and when I had picked my route choice it was really difficult to run it and remember where I had planned to run. So my opinion is that the concept is very interesting and challenging, but it needs to be tuned down just a little bit. If not luck starts to play a big part.

In the sprint relay I find it difficult to judge if the forking was fair or not, but I am happy to see that the forking was gender specific! The usage of fences was about the same as in the sprint finale, and I think it would be good to tune it down a little bit, to make it more fair. What I did not like was that the course planers had put the controls crisscrossed over the map, with very narrow angles (as my 1., 2. & 3. control, as well as the last loop in the park) and that together with all the fences made it really difficult to both have the control over where it was possible to pass all the fences and at the same time keep track on which control to approach next. Additionally, it is not optimal or fair when runners are running in opposite directions around narrow corners and along fences. This is what’s happening when the courses crisscross too much and the angles between two controls are too narrow.

By: Jan Kocbach

Jan Kocbach — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 08:26:15 +0000

The fences are there to make it more challenging and interesting, not just for the fun. Why is this not suitable for a WOC race? Why does it make it worse for the spectators/viewers than in a race where running is the only challenge?

By: Terje Mathisen

Terje Mathisen — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 08:10:59 +0000

In some previous relays, the GPS tracking has been annotated with each runner’s forking combination, this makes it much more obvious when somebody is following the wrong pack/other runner.

I do agree that the controls 1-4 relay maze were everything was mixed up in a very small area made it totally impossible to figure out if/when someone made a mistake. :-(

I.e. when you have a little bad but still reasonable route choices that pass another forking it is impossible to figure out if that runner punched this control or not.