Sprint Race Venues

[Gnitworp]

Venues for major sprint races in recent years seem to have been exclusively in urban parks and/or built up areas such as university campuses. In the past, detailed quarried or similar areas with very complex contours have been used such as Ham Hill in Somerset (2003 BOC). An interesting mixure of wooded and open dunes and an old town centre was used for WMOC 2008 in Portugal. Is dodging round buildings or dashing between parkland trees now the established 'style' for sprint orienteering, and is the rather different skill of dealing with very complex contours at speed, especially where visibility is reduced in woodland, now considered inappropriate to the discipline?

[Gross]

First WOC Sprint was in forest.... good race to... at Tampere

[Nottinghamshire outlaw]

Interesting question - perhaps the question should also have included planning style as well?

See: http://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/20110416ccsprintD/ for the Craft Cup Sprint in Norway which Harry won just the week before the JK. Different terrain and style of planning - more about route choice than control picking (and spending time worrying about the control descriptions).

The 'control picking' style at the JK suited me more than one which would favour the runner!! (:

[andypat]

See this info from BOF guidelines for sprint for an explanation:


1. Terrain
Sprint races are normally staged in very runnable park or urban (streets/buildings) terrain.
Occasionally, some fast runnable forest may be included.
One key aspect of the philosophy of Sprint orienteering is that it must be clearly different
in nature from the Middle and Long disciplines. Thus it must not merely be a very short
version of them, so terrain which is largely forested may not be used for Sprint
competitionshttp://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/images/uploaded/downloads/events_guideline_d.pdf

I think its OK for orienteering to evolve and also for there to be variety. But given that there is now very definitely a tendency for some orienteers to specialise in sprint O - I can think of one or two examples on here - I also think there must be some consistency of approach within disciplines.

Personally my favourite event of last year was the prologue of the PWT at Scone Palace - definitely a classic parkland event.

[Dave]

I dont think there is a massive problem with using more urban areas than not for sprint o. However, I don't fully agree with that bof guideline. I don't think sprints should be planned to be as different from middle and long-o as possible.

If a course is planned that will challenge the competitors to keep in control while running flat out for 12 minutes then it shouldn't matter whether it is entirely tarmac, or if it includes forest/sand dunes etc. IMO.

[Big Jon]

Sprint race at Scottish Champs 2012 - will include urban, city-forest and plantation forest (if the planner can squeeze the right length course out of the area. Will be a cracking race. I believe the key to all orienteering courses is "changes", so the more terrain types etc the better.

[andypat]

Good point Jon.
And you can try to incorporate changes even if you dont have a lot of forest

http://www.clyde.routegadget.co.uk/clyde/reitti.cgi?act=map&id=3&kieli=

[EriOL]

The reason forest sprints are now usuall avoided for all important events is that they are often decided by chance rather than skill. The runnability simply varies too much in the forest for it to always be correctly represented on the map with the specifications we have to work with. In a race which is only 12-15 minutes long and is often decided by seconds these elements of chance will not even out during the course. For instance, a lucky routechoice through medium green (20-60% runnability) on one leg have the potential to win the whole race. When the short distance was first introduced, the IOF came to the conclusion that competitions in forest terrain shorter than 25 minutes were not fair.

Sprint coursesetters must be realy careful when planning legs through forested terrain to not include any routechoices where it's impossible to see the best route on the map. In my opinion, the EOC sprint in Bulgaria was bordering on this problem.