Comments on: Route to O-Season 2020: Day 6

By: MM

MM — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 13:12:58 +0000

I tend to agree with VN on his assessment that this leg – and the complete race – was made unnecesseraly complex by the course setter. The excessive usage of out-of-bounds areas and lines is a very dangerous tool, in this case this just transforms the terrain into an artificial labyrinth. One might argue, that given the relative simplicity of this part of terrain, this was the only solution, but this coudl have been achieved by less extra addition as well.
Looking at the result list (http://admin.mtfsz.hu/fajl/get/fajl_id/20922/tipus/render) one might notice the unsually high ratio of disqualified atheletes (M45 was an extreme case). I believe the this supports my argument above.

By: Jan Kocbach

Jan Kocbach — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 15:54:28 +0000

Thanks a lot for your comment, VN. This is an interesting discussion which I definitely welcome. In general I agree that you don’t want too complex “labyrinth-like” legs, but this particular leg is well within what I think is fair, and which an elite orienteer can figure out fast enough. 15-20 seconds to find the best route is no problem at all for the most tricky leg on the course (although I think the best runners are much faster than that) – that is done while running earlier on the course. You can’t always start thinking about your routechoice when approaching the control – here you really have to preplan. Who talked about stopping for 10-15 seconds? For this particular leg:

(1) You can quickly understand that the leg has two halves which can be handled separately.
(2) The second half is quite easy to handle (you can also handle it while running the first part)
(3) The first half is the “tricky” part. However, it is short and it is completely flat, so you don’t need to care about altitude differences. Also, it isn’t actually very “labyrinthic” if you look at what you really have to solve here:

By: VN

VN — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 10:47:27 +0000

I most certainly disagree with the statement that this a great leg. If you maybe have to stop for 10-15 seconds and identify possible routes first (because it’s simply impossible to solve it while running, not to speak about route selection), does this still make a great sprint leg? Does this fulfill the definiton of the discipline?
We had a similar discussion after Czech Cup in Pilsen and then again after WC in Mladá Boleslav – if studying the route costs you 15″, then you still choose the wromg route, which means additional 30″ and the race for you is pretty much over, does this make a good sprint course?
Please do not glorify such routes, during a good sprint race the routes should be visible immediately, it’s all about route selection in high speed.
Thank you ;)