David May wrote:...
Thus it would seem to be logical to change the minimum feature separation rules for Sprint races to 10m for dissimilar features and 20m for similar ones. This would put a greater premium on accurate navigation, especially when urban terrain is used where technical difficulty is not high.
Comments??
My comment would be that there is absolutely no need to have 2 controls within 10m or even 20m of each other, or at least where that distance is across smooth grass (ok if they are 2 sides of a big uncrossable feature then that is understandable, and fair enough since if you came across one rather than the other you'd obviously be wrong). I'd have to ask what the logic behind having two controls so close together is - is it really to provide a technical orienteering challenge, or is to to try and catch people out because there isn't enough of an orienteering challenge? If it's the former then I'd say a very strange (i.e. wrong) definition of a technical challenge is being used. If it's the latter then by definition it should have no place in orienteering.
Just to illustrate this from the WUOC sprint (read this in conjunction with the map below) - nos. 14/15 and nos. 22/23 it makes no difference to the technical content of the leg(s) which of those controls is used - so why have two controls at each of those if it's not in the hope/expectation of catching people out?