Comments on: WOC 2021 Sprint Relay: GPS & Splits Analysis

By: JW

JW — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 12:11:24 +0000

That is probably the biggest challenge in broadcasting sprint relay (and also sprint, but to a lesser extent). It is very difficult to figure out what has happened on the fly. Situations change, but nobody knows why, which is horrible from the viewers’ standpoint. To explain what has happened, one need split times and GPS and lots of time (like this article).

First thing to avoid would be setting up very small technical areas (like 8-10), where the GPS tracking turns into a giant mess. How to still make the forkings and courses in general tricky enough, I have no idea…

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 10:05:04 +0000

Yes, this analysis shows this was great coarse setting by the czech arrangers. To the difference from EOC where the swiss team simply ran away from the others in a coarse without orienteering challenges, Sweden here had high speed but also made less mistakes in a very tricky competition.
Also a tribute to the finnishing half of the norwegian team who really showed their skills and how this should be done!

By: Knut Wiig Mathisen

Knut Wiig Mathisen — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 05:55:59 +0000

Great analysis, thanks. It is a pity that most of these exciting differences with time losses and gains could not be visualized and explained in the live TV-broadcast. The impression that Sweden was totally dominating the race, being far better than all other teams on running speed and had a close to perfect technical execution is just wrong. All teams, including the medalists had significant time-losses. The route-choice challenge and course setter trap from control 5 to 7 was quite good explained, but the the expected time losses could have been estimated in seconds by the course setter so that the commentators could simply state this. E.g., that KHF now would gain approx. 15 seconds on MH. The 8-10 leg mistakes, e.g. by JH, disappeared completely. Also a pity that the GPS-tracking on TV could not highlight the dramatic fact that TA ran into a dead end and had to turn back towards control 17R. Still the TV broadcast was a great step up compared to e.g. EOC sprint relay, with better GPS and better visualization of the technical route-choice challenges and differences. Final note, you have a small typo, talking twice about leg 9 in the leg 1 analysis.