Finally back from WMOC in Finland.
Firstly many congratulations to Liz Campell on becoming WORLD W50 CHAMPION with an almost 5 minute margin.
Commiserations to Anne Donnell for missing out on a medal by 1 place.
What might have been for Jon Musgrave if he'd remembered on the start line that he is no longer M40??
I was warned that it was impossible to do well in Finland without experience. Thus following 2 poor seasons I was anticipating struggling to qualify, howver the terrain suited me perfectly and all my missing form returned. Sadly one of several hitches with the event arose in my final. I was running so confidently that I took the direct line over a series of hill tops intending to pick up a 2 contour hill just in front of the control. Sudenly I noticed a tag line making it into a depression and it became incomprehensible. Every time I saw the hill I moved away. The tag line turns out to be a meaningless extraneous dot on the map. It interests me that 2 top M55s including Tom Karlsen also lost about 7 minutes here - did they have the same problem. The 5th placed finisher who I led from there to the finish said "I'm glad I didn't see that" when I showed it to him.
Anyway gripe over, the terain, maps and courses were BRILLIANT, but perhaps we should criticise our own events a little less. A few things at this premier event were far from perfect.
The starts on qualfier 1 were chaotic. With a 6 minute call up someone decided to have the call up clock at 3 minutes before race time! Worse still everyone was waiting in a tiny space and none of the officials spoke English. The worst individual case I heard of was a 10 minute late start. The jury came up with a compromise requiring no course voiding. The starts were put right after that except that the call up clocks were set at race time!
The IOF approve a special map symbol of parallel dots to represent direction of furrows - totally unnecessary - all it did was make the map hard to read.
It seems that reinventing the wheel is not a good idea at major events.
The less important things that were not done well were the prie giving and the commentry.
Prize giving started long before may classes were decided and went on in dribs and drabs for about 2 hours. Seemingly random classes were called to the prize area, were then presented, 2 classes at a time before a hiatus before another lot were called .... Despite a good arena there was no sense of occasion and I doubt anyone attended it all.
The commentry team were admirable linguists. The problem was that they made announcements in the language of the incoming runner. Thus I knew I was winning both qualifiers as I apprached the finish but as there were no other English speaking nations in my heat there was never any more information about my class.
Still despite all this it was a great event and the sun even shone for 2 days.
WMOC musings
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