Isms, schisms

[Kitch]

I am gladdenned by the responses.

And therefore is orienteering any more diluted as a sport than track?

If Usain Bolt breaks world 400m record is then there no point in having 100, 200, 400 races?

I think you could certainly argue that 200m is superfluous, it can and often is won by either a 100m champion or a 400m champion.
you could also argue that 800m and 1500m are much the same, 5km and 10km are much the same, since these pairings can be won by the same person in the same championship.
We accept that world / olympic track are a pinnacle of athleticism. The demands in reaching these heights are such that training must be absolutely specific and focussed.
So if one person can win at two distances then we can assume that (given the demands for specificity to achieve excellence) the two distances are essentially the same in their physical demands - therefore why give out two medals for the same challenge ?

multi disciplines in World Championship orienteering would have more credibility if athletes focussed entirley on one or the other. This does happen - excepting Thierry who has taken ownership of middle - he is outstanding. Others should do the same and seek to dominate to the extent that anyone trying to go multi distance does not have a chance.
Either the athletes have to get serious about one distance or another - making them distinct - or forget it and just have one race.

trouble is
in orienteering, outside of Scandinavia, there aren't the numbers to support sufficient quality of competition at the elite level across three disinct disciplines.

Pehaps GB should decide to be a sprint nation - its where we get our best results in numbers.
Christ - did I just say that !??
sprint and middle and forget the Long.
that would keep up competitive in the relay.

[Gross]

40m - maybe they should put that in the Olympics

chance for me then.... eh Big Jon

[EddieH]

Roger wrote "I understand where you are coming from Eddie, and I can see you are defending the current situation."

Hardly - does anyone actually know what the current situation actually is? We have been arguing for the age groups to match the elite competitions for years, adn only in this coming year is that happening. However the British Sprint is being put on in Scotland with only a regional event (as far as the English are concerned) to go with it. I predict a very low entry because of that - then you and others will start arguing for massive age groups. - Cart and horse?

Serious competition MOTIVATES serious competitors and raises standards. No M65 can seriously compete at M55 - that is, and is likely to remain a fact.

[Patrick]

Reflecting on my previous post, I should point out that Kitch's original point:

What exactly is the point of different WOC disciplines if the same people are the best at all of them ?

...is debatable at best if you take Simone out of the equation. And taking Simone out of the equation might be argued to be fair enough - after all, is it any more embarrassing to have one person winning all the golds than to have someone winning races by over 5 minutes?

Looking back over the WOCs since 2001, only on one occasion has one man won two individual titles in the same year (Thierry in 2007, in Sprint and Middle), and only one other man has won gold in multiple disciplines (Khramov - Long in 2005 and Sprint in 2008).

Cheers,

Patrick

[andy]

Pehaps GB should decide to be a sprint nation - its where we get our best results in numbers.
Christ - did I just say that !??
sprint and middle and forget the Long.
that would keep up competitive in the relay.

I think there's much less of a gap between middle/long than middle/sprint. Any good middle runner with the endurance to run through terrain for 90+ minutes is going to do well.

Personally I'd love to see WOC less often, every 2 preferably 4 years and more of a focus put on the WCup (or do it like they do in track cycling, where you have to get good results in world cup events to race the world champs)

[graeme]

But judging by how mach attention people pay to (the World Champs), it has been (devalued). Most people have no idea who the world champion is e.g. a month after WOC I had a confusing conversation with a GB team selector praising the men for retaining their titles! When it was less frequent one could keep up. I'd also say that annual World Champs has majorly devalued the World Cup - even athletes on the fringe of the squad getting their first selection can't be a***ed to go.

So I can claim to have beaten kitch to the same rant.

Couple of facts though: Patrick says only two men have won golds if different disciplines. But only two have won another golds in the same discipline. So it doesn't tell us much.

Meanwhile Thierry is ex-World Sprint Champion and unbeaten in three years (7 races) at World Ranking Event Long races (losing four times in WRE middles in the same period). He might create the aura of a specialist by focussing on middle at WOCs, but in fact he's just brilliant at everything.

[Patrick]

Meanwhile Thierry is ex-World Sprint Champion and unbeaten in three years (7 races) at World Ranking Event Long races (losing four times in WRE middles in the same period).

Well he came 9th in the World Cup Long at the O-Ringen last year which was the only "major" long race he ran. Admittedly he didn't win the Sprint or Middle either (3rd and 2nd respectively) but he's certainly not unbeaten in the last three years, which is what the casual observer might have picked up from your post. Of the other "Long" WREs he ran in 2007-8 the longest time he took was 82 minutes, so none were Long in the WOC sense of the word. If you look at WOC/EOC/World Cup races we get:

Sprint: 4 wins from 8 starts
Middle: 6 wins from 9 starts (twice 2nd to Hubmann)
Long: 0 wins from 2 starts (including 1 DQ for missing a butterfly loop - I don't think he was winning at the time though)

All of which suggests two things to me:
1) Thierry's record in races with 90+ min winning times is less impressive than over shorter distances.

2) Contrary to what Andy D said, Sprint/Middle is an easier double to do than Middle/Long (if only because of the physical demands of the long).

Incidentally, one feature of Sprints that hasn't been mentioned is that WOC Sprint usually has more park than a typical city race because the IOF demand a car free area. Although they can still be quite complex (eg WOC2006) they are definitely a step down in difficulty from the hardest urban O, making them much more similar to the Middle in terms of technique.

Anyway, I read that Thierry is now concentrating on the Long for WOC2009 having deliberately avoided it for several years, so we'll find out in August just how good he is. Personally, my money's on Hubmann if he stays healthy all season.

Cheers,

Patrick

[graeme]

Personally, my money's on Hubmann

Quite likely: he's brilliant at all distances too.

(sorry to mislead, I didn't know what "Long Pair start" format is)

[greywolf]

I think you could certainly argue that 200m is superfluous, it can and often is won by either a 100m champion or a 400m champion.
you could also argue that 800m and 1500m are much the same, 5km and 10km are much the same, since these pairings can be won by the same person in the same championship.

but by the same logic 400 & 800 are the same: Juantorena and god help us Kratochvilova, and 1500 & 5k are the same: El Guerrouj, Lagat, (and Kip Keino could do 3k steeplechase as well..) ..should the olympic programme be trimmed to 100, 1500 & marathon?

back to WOC - and I agree, it's at least partly due to lack of numbers: more competition would drive specialisation

[Big Jon]

re specialisation - in 2002 Jamie Stevenson decided to concentrate on sprint & middle and give long less attention (indeed chose not to race it) and look what happened. If more athletes in GB chose to concentrate on one or other discipline their results would improve, however it is a brave move to cut out 1/3 of your chances of running at WOC....

[graeme]

I seem to remember a certain Mrs. Baker focussing on the classic in 1999 too...

Rowing = Cycling (Rebecca Romero)

Cricket = Long Jump = King of Albania anyone?

[awk]

I think you could certainly argue that 200m is superfluous, it can and often is won by either a 100m champion or a 400m champion.

Since WW2, the Men's 100/200 double has been achieved 4 times in 16 Olympics: 1956 (Morrow), 1972 (Borzov), 1984 (Lewis) and 2008 (Bolt). The 200/400 double just once in 1996, by, of course, Michael Johnson.

In the Women's, the 100/200 double has been achieved 6 times in 16 goes: 1948 (Blankers-Koen), 1952 (Jackson), 1956 (Cuthbert), 1960 (Rudolph), 1972 (Stecher), 1988 (Griffith-Joyner); the 200/400 double twice: 1984 (Brisco-Hooks), 1996 (Perec).

It does seem that the 100/200 double is becoming less and less frequent. It was more common than not pre-WW2 for the double to be achieved (for women this tendency continued until 1960); in the last 5 Olympics only Bolt has achieved this in either sex.

[graeme]

200/400 double is pretty well impossible because of the scheduling, no recovery time between heats. Similarly 800/400. They had to change the schedule in Atlanta to let Johnson double up. (Sorry greywolf - I can't remember the schedules from the 70s!)
.

Back with WOC. We're at the stage where even the afficionados here, the British Squad themselves and the Selectors don't know who the World Champion(s) is(are) without looking it up. Legends that nobody knows.
It used to be simple: when I started everyone knew Kari Sallinen was the greatest .

[Gnitworp]

Is track athletics a good analogy for O?

In many ways golf is better, where a prolonged test enables the most consistent performer to prevail.

flash-in-the-pan merchants don't accidently put the ball down the hole, it's what they intended to do... that isn't luck. it's skill. the difference between those players and the tournament winners is consistency. the top players hit top shots more often. it doesn't mean when a lower ranked player hits a top shot it is luck, it is premeditated, it is what they wanted to do, they just don't have to skill to make sure they hit shots like that every time they swing the club

In exactly the same way lesser orienteers just don't have the skill to run straight into every control on the best route on every leg they run. Track athletics isn't a complicated skill subject to unpredictability of terrain, and is therefore without the luck elements that need to be compensated for by having a sufficiently prolonged event.

Golf against the clock would be even more similar to orienteering - almost identical.

[fish]

Not sure it is really the number of disciplines that is a problem, but I dont think that the annual WOC helps - and if there was just one race the annual event might work better.

I think the WOC sprint should be encouraged to be as urban as possible - it should be a park/city sprint and not a forest race (to give as big a differential as possible). This race in a woc week gives obvious "immediate" media accesibility (if this is something considered important.
Middle/short should remain close to present - not sure what the winning time is at the moment, but I think 25-30mins is better than edging out to 35-40. And definitely fine detail technical.
Classic/Long - 90+ mins, but should not be focussing on just route choice, should be a complete test. Sections of fine detail, some big macro route choice, lots of micro route choice. It is a long race, so no point setting it up for "immediate - on the day" media coverage. Return to 3 or 4 min start intervals. No need to start and finish in same place, the orienteering challenge shouldnt be reduced by spending extra time in crap forest near a good arena. (although good arena for finish is still sensible). As Kitch originally said - a race in some of the best forest out there.
Relay - seems to be about right at the moment, with many countries competitive for medals.

So my main thoughts would be:
every two years
urban/park type sprint
and dont bastardise the classic - take it back to simply a test of individual orienteering over 90+ mins

fish