Route to Christmas: Day 21 2024

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is from one of the Top 10 courses in Course of the Year 2024: The World Orienteering Championships Sprint, organized in Edinburgh, Scotland this July.

The chosen leg is one of the decisive legs – the leg to the 15th control in the men’s course and the 13th control in the women’s course.

Note that voting for Course of the Year 2024 finished yesterday – results will be presented when interviews with the course setter of Course of the Year 2024 is finalized and published.

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.

For the analysis, we have chosen to focus on the men’s class – but will add some details on the women’s class at the bottom of the article. You can take a look at how the runners have solved this leg in the men’s class below. The routes are colored according to fastest split time on the leg, with the fastest routes in green and the slowest in red.

Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant.

Then an overview of who chose which variant (top 25% finishers in dark color):

Then an overview of which variant is fastest:

 

Note that a surprising amount of Top 25%-finishers (3 og 6 in total) chose the yellow E-variant all the way to the right, which was one of the slower variants. Also interesting: The green and purple routes where chosen by most athletes (26 athletes), but only 2 of the Top 25%-finishers chose these variants. Finally, only 7 athletes chose the blue, fastest variant – of these 4 where Top 25%-finishers. Looks like the course setter really succeeded here. Part of the story is that the possible route choices for this leg looked completely different on the old map, so here it was all about being (1) prepared and (2) flexible.

Here is the analysis from the (more limited) WOC 2024 Sprint analysis article:

This was the most decisive leg of the day, with very few runners spotting the fastest option which is a S-variant going right-left-right (blue variant). While having quite a few steep staircases, this variant is short without too many 90-degree turns. Six of the seven fastest times on the leg are run on this variant – and Regborn was the only one of the Top 4 spotting this route. Is the leg too tricky when it is so difficult to spot the fastest route? On the other hand, among the 7 runners taking this route, we find Sprint World Champions Kasper Fosser, Daniel Hubmann and Martin Regborn along with World Cup winner Ralph Street and World Champs silver medalist Tino Polsini.

Geek content

We start off with a plot over relative time gain/loss based on each runners performance:

This last illustration basically tells that the ones choosing the blue variant on average where the fastest, on average gaining 15 seconds when accounting for overall performance on the course, but some runners gaining as much as 24 seconds while some not gaining time at all. The table below shows some summary statistics, and the tables below some details on chosen variant ordered by both overall results and leg results.

	A	B	C	D	E
Time loss*	+0:00	+0:07	+0:13	+0:20	+0:08
Best	2:18	2:36	2:38	2:32	2:32
# Routes	7	3	13	13	6
# Top runners	4	1	1	1	3
Best 25%	+0:02	+0:18	+0:20	+0:17	+0:16
Average	+0:08	+0:24	+0:28	+0:26	+0:21
Fastest	1. Martin Regborn (2nd overall)	11. Tuomas Heikkila (8th overall)	15. Havard Sandstad Eidsmo (13th overall)	6. Akseli Ruohola (23rd overall)	6. Tim Robertson (6th overall)

* Time loss is calculated based on performance index based calculation of expected split time for all competitors. 

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Fastest variants: AAAAAD AEDDAB EECCEC CCCBED DDCDCD DCCDDB DECCDC

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Chosen variant ordered by leg result

#	Name	Var	Time	Behind
1.	Martin Regborn (2nd / -12.6)	A	2:18	+ 0:00
2.	Ralph Street (29th / -25.5)	A	2:22	+ 0:04
3.	Kasper Harlem Fosser (17th / -19.5)	A	2:23	+ 0:05
4.	Daniel Hubmann (10th / -13.4)	A	2:26	+ 0:08
4.	Francesco Mariani (5th / -11.4)	A	2:26	+ 0:08
6.	Akseli Ruohola (23rd / -13.6)	D	2:32	+ 0:14
6.	Tino Polsini (3rd / -2.4)	A	2:32	+ 0:14
6.	Tim Robertson (6th / -5.6)	E	2:32	+ 0:14
9.	Miika Kirmula (14th / -8.3)	D	2:33	+ 0:15
10.	Emil Svensk (1st / 10.9)	D	2:34	+ 0:16
11.	Mattia Debertolis (26th / -10.5)	A	2:36	+ 0:18
11.	Tuomas Heikkila (8th / -2.2)	B	2:36	+ 0:18
13.	Henry McNulty (6th / -0.6)	E	2:37	+ 0:19
13.	Tomas Krivda (23rd / -8.6)	E	2:37	+ 0:19
15.	Havard Sandstad Eidsmo (13th / -2.9)	C	2:38	+ 0:20
15.	Jannis Bonek (22nd / -7.1)	C	2:38	+ 0:20
17.	Joseph Lynch (8th / 0.8)	E	2:39	+ 0:21
17.	Mathias Peter (38th / -15.3)	C	2:39	+ 0:21
17.	Gustav Bergman (4th / 3.6)	C	2:39	+ 0:21
20.	Loic Capbern (18th / -3.3)	C	2:40	+ 0:22
20.	Ferenc Jonas (27th / -6.7)	C	2:40	+ 0:22
20.	Nathan Lawson (15th / -2.1)	B	2:40	+ 0:22
20.	Pablo Ferrando (37th / -14.0)	E	2:40	+ 0:22
24.	Alvaro Casado (18th / -1.3)	D	2:42	+ 0:24
24.	Elias Jonsson (16th / -0.4)	D	2:42	+ 0:24
26.	Andreas Bock Bjoernsen (21st / -1.6)	D	2:43	+ 0:25
27.	Ricardo Esteves Ferreira (40th / -16.1)	C	2:44	+ 0:26
27.	Yannick Michiels (11th / 3.7)	D	2:44	+ 0:26
29.	Martin Roudny (25th / -1.0)	C	2:45	+ 0:27
29.	Adrien Delenne (36th / -8.8)	D	2:45	+ 0:27
31.	Mathias Barros Vallet (12th / 6.2)	D	2:47	+ 0:29
31.	Giacomo Zagonel (33rd / -5.6)	C	2:47	+ 0:29
31.	Ruslan Glibov (20th / 2.5)	C	2:47	+ 0:29
34.	Zoltan Bujdoso (30th / 1.2)	D	2:49	+ 0:31
35.	Warre De Cuyper (35th / -3.4)	D	2:50	+ 0:32
36.	Brodie Nankervis (41st / -9.5)	B	2:52	+ 0:34
37.	Matthias Reiner (31st / 4.9)	D	2:53	+ 0:35
38.	David Rojas (28th / 7.0)	E	2:54	+ 0:36
39.	Martin Rohac (34th / 2.0)	C	2:55	+ 0:37
40.	Fricis Spektors (39th / 5.9)	C	3:02	+ 0:44
41.	Mihaly Ormay (32nd / 11.2)	D	3:03	+ 0:45
42.	Emil Oebro (42nd / 0.7)	C	3:07	+ 0:49

Women’s class

The leg to control 13 in the women’s course is the same as the men’s leg to the 15th control. Again the S-shaped route is the fastest (except for Tove Alexandersson who can run the fastest split on nearly any route choice). Note however that a lot more women choose this fastest variant than what we see among the men.

 

Density map

See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far (available during the day when some readers have drawn their route).

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, 3DRerun, Loggator or Livelox from 2024-competitions, or old forgotten ones which are still interesting, please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll consider including it in Route to Christmas if it looks good. Route to Christmas gets interesting due to YOUR 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!