World of O News
In today’s edition of Route to Christmas we travel to Switzerland and to the European Championships Long – one of the highlights on the international orienteering calendar this year. The chosen leg is leg 25 in the M21 course, the decisive leg for the overall victory where several top runners lost significant time. Can you make the right choice?
The leg is as usually first provided without routes – you may take a look at it and think about how you would attack this leg (if the image is too small, you may click on it to get it larger):
Location
You find other maps from the area in omaps.worldofo.com here. See also latest additions in 3DRerun from this area in order to learn more about this terrain type.
Webroute
Next you can draw your own route using the ‘Webroute’ below. Think through how you would attack this leg, and draw the route you would have made. Some comments about why you would choose a certain route are always nice for the other readers.
Then you can take a look at how the runners have solved this leg below. As you can see, the S-shaped blue route (what did you learn about S-shaped routes?) is clearly the fastest, with many top runners choosing the red or green route, losing 2-3 minutes or more to the best time of Fabian Hertner.
Here is what happened on this leg (from the EOC Long analysis article):
- Hubmann (finishing in 5th place, 1:53 behind Lundanes, in the end) lost nearly 3 minutes to Lundanes on this leg taking the wrong routechoice, running to the right while Lundanes along with most of the field chose a more direct approach.
- Tranchand (finishing in 4th place, 1:27 behind Lundanes, in the end) lost nearly 2 minutes here by also taking a wrong routechoice (Tranchand went left while Hubmann went right).
- Kyburz took the correct route choice, but lost nearly 2 minutes here due to a mistake when approaching the control (finishing in 2nd place, 0:53 behind Lundanes, in the end).
- Several other highly placed runners also either missed the control or took the wrong routechoice, e.g. Magne Dæhli.
Density map
See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far.
Additional information
You find the complete map in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.
Route to Christmas series
The Route to Christmas series is a pre-Christmas tradition at World of O – giving the readers the opportunity to do one Route Choice Challenge each day from December 1st until December 24th. If you have got any good legs in GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2018-competitions – or old forgotten ones which are still interesting – please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll include it in Route to Christmas if it looks good. Route to Christmas will not be interesting if YOU don’t contribute.
Not all legs are taken for the interesting routechoice alternatives – some are also taken because the map is interesting – or because it is not straightforward to see what to do on a certain leg. Any comments are welcome – especially if you ran the event chosen for todays leg!
