OMM on the BBC Adventure Show

[david_rosen]

Yes, Miriam and I were there. As you say

there was no need for the controls to be like that

There seemed to be no hint of an apology in the interviews with controller and planner.
Of course Steve and Jethro had cut the corner by punching the lower control so a time penalty was needed to compensate, but it should have been just two or three minutes to reflect the extra time it would have taken them to go the short way up to the other control and back down again.
We know in orienteering that it is not possible for those involved in creating an organisational error to judge totally objectively on the treatment of those affected by it. That is why for major events, there is the possibility to put a protest to an independent jury.
We were disqualified at this year's OMM for a trivial transgression which also (I claim) was caused by organisational errors.
I've suggested to Jen Longbottom that a high-status event like the OMM needs to have the possibility of putting protests to a jury and she was receptive to the idea so hopefully it will be in place for the 2012 event.

[andypat]

IMO it seems fairly obvious that the 30 min time penalty was to:

A - Avoid a hullaballoo over one of the favourites being DQ when there was an underlying fault with the course.

B - Attempt to ensure that a team who hadnt visited all the correct controls actually won!

So a bit of a fudge really.

What was your trivial transgression David since you mention it?

[david_rosen]

Since you ask ....

In brief, we were disqualified 10 seconds after we started.

The full tale is that having got lost on a bracken-covered hillside in the half-light (along with the rest of our 'coach party') on the inadequately-taped route to the start, we were inclined to take a safe route to our first control. So when we looked at our maps at the start, we saw that there was a choice of contouring along the hillside or following the forest road which would be safer but meant losing a few contours and climbing again. We ran past the slightly-surprised start official (Angela Whitworth) along the track and off towards control 1, opening and closing a gate after 400m to get back onto the open fell. We finished Day 1 and our result went up. We finished Day 2 and downloaded OK. It was only on Monday when we saw that we had been disqualified.

It turned out that the area we had run through was out-of-bounds. How had we failed to spot that? We certainly hadn't thought - "Let's cut through the out-of-bounds".

When I looked closely at the map, I saw that the open area near the start was indeed 'out-of-bounds' although the purple overprint wasn't very clear. And the black line of the forest road was completely unaffected by the purple OOB lines. I discovered that Stirling Surveys had used transparent purple for the purple OOB. Transparent purple is a good idea for the control circles and lines, but it is incorrect to use it for OOB. Any black features are totally unaffected by transparent purple. In OCAD, the OOB purple is full non-transparent purple.

So we did run through an area marked out-of-bounds. But, in mitigation,
The OOB overprinting was incorrect
The track was clearly not out-of-bounds to the event as far as the landowner was concerned since it was part of the route to the start
It is not good practice to plan a leg where an OOB route is an obvious option
We gained no particular advantage taking that route - in fact it may have lost us a minute
Angela told me that a number of other pairs tried to do the same thing, but by then she was awake enough to stop them
In the context of a 2-day Mountain Marathon, the 'offence' was completely trivial and disqualification was a totally inappropriate penalty.

I put these points to the controller, but he was completely inflexible and very reluctant to admit that there was any fault in the printing.

[madmike]

Does seem very petty to me particularly as they had to stop other people doing the same, surely indicating to any reasonable person that there was a planning and controlling shortfall. Moreover, I would be surprised if you didn't lose time going that way as it was pretty runnable going straight across and hitting the track further up.

Poor decision from the Controller

Edit: poor spelling changed so I don't get in trouble with Mrs H again