Orienteering Planner of the Year

[awk]

These best planning awards always tend to end up being "who had the best area to plan on".

I think if you read through the thread so far Graeme, that's anything but the case - some very 'ordinary' areas have been nominated. In fact, one of the themes that I've found this year is that areas I've most looked forward to have actually provided the least successful planning.

[Simon E]

I'm very glad to see that the World Cup planners (Andy Jones, Tim Denton, Steve McKinley, Ronan Cleary, Julie Cleary) are getting mentioned here. I think all of them showed that the South East can put on excellent events if you think hard about how to plan the courses.

I am obviously biased, having controlled the two sprint races, but I'd agree that Andy Jones did a fantastic job at Guildford and Battersea. He had some very definite ideas about what he was trying to do, and it showed. For more background to the two events see the two articles I wrote for the HH newsletter:

http://www.maprunner.org.uk/articles/worldcupcontrolling.pdf

http://www.maprunner.org.uk/articles/worldcuptop10.pdf

Away from the World Cup, my personal nomination for the best planned course given the limitations of the area would be the BEOC Middle Distance Race. All the classic elements: changes of direction and leg length, controls in low visibility areas, route choice. As an added bonus it allows me to claim I am ranked 1705th in the world.

[distracted]

The World Cup middle on Leith Hill was very well done IMO. very fast section at the beginning, climb into the technical area and then a clever use of the contrast between the fast open forest and the tricky technical section meant that you had to be switched on all of the time.

[Jon X]

I agree, I thought both the BEOC middle at Sandhurst and the World Cup middle at Leith Hill were excellent for the reasons already mentioned.

I will leave it to another thread for any debate whether either of these would have been improved by Micro-O...

I also thought that the British Relays at Penhale were excellent (unlike their weather). This was helped by the area, but good courses and use of gaffling seemed to cause a lot of competent orienteers a lot of confusion and time loss!

[helen]

I very much enjoyed the British at Penhale. Yes, its a great area and I always enjoy running there, but I thought the planning was really superb too. Same with the Trossachs Regional event in March.

[Carnage Head]

The Surrey 5-O Day 1 M21S at Guildford Uni/ Guildford Cathedral was amazing. Full-on carnaging through all kinds of urban concrete. Good use of contours, and few shared legs as far as I remember, meaning that dozens of people could compete on one area without much chance of colliding. Brilliant! And little ankle-twisting potential, either - all the better!

And S6D day one - straight into some big-time intricacy, to keep everyone on their toes right from the word go.

[rob f]

I would have to agree with awk and helen, and nominate ben chesters for it for the british, but there is little you can do wrong there.
Matt speake's JM5L at barnscliffe was very good as well, a good mix of terrain. I can't really comment on too much though, having not done a great amount this year