Tesco 3 for 2

[graeme]

Bonus Q: which club's women are so strong that their representative at WOC is only their 12th highest ranked?
JK

Its a bit pointless comparing people who don't have a full set of scores. It would be worrying if she didn't have the highest average score (but she does, by some margin).

In fact, the highest GB-women average ranking scores (all events, not top-6) are Tessa Hill, Claire Ward, Helen Palmer, Hollie Orr and Catherine Taylor. Notice anything significant there?

[greywolf]

You can also joke with the DEE guys at the top of Short Brown at http://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/i ... &course=3& about what double-super-secret training they had been doing over the holiday period!

They are the beneficiaries of a weakness in the algorithm, which uses the pre-existing average scores of competitors to assess the strength and variability of the field for any course and then allocates points accordingly, and also (I think) of a club not uploading results correctly.

The algorithm usually works more or less OK, but struggles if the actual variability of the field is much less than that suggested by existing scores. This occasionally happens when you have a novice who improves massively from one event to the next (which perhaps explains why such anomalies are more common in urban races - you can imagine a novice orienteer / good runner getting horribly lost in the forest at their first event but then putting in a reasonable performance in town). It also explains why mistaken identity / wrong BOF numbers can have such as impact.

In this instance at the DEE short brown there's a Mr Simpson from MDOC in the middle of the field doing a respectable 1hr29mins for 8.2 km whose only previous score was 542 points (1hr24mins for 3.6km) at an EPOC event a couple of weeks previously.

However, the results for this EPOC event say "56th Paul Simpson +Fray Harker MDOC M40 84:00" which suggest that he wasn't running alone, so should have been marked n/c, and not allocated any ranking points.

He then would have had no previous ranking scores, and would have been omitted from the algorithm's assessment of the field at the DEE event in January - without the distorting effect of his one very poor score the points awarded would have been radically revised - with winner getting somewhere around 1300 points etc.

[greywolf]

Points for JK day 2/3 combined now removed

[DeerTick]

Points for JK day 2/3 combined now removed

Yeah!