Inadvertant cheating on ISSOM

[Big Jon]

The problem is clearly much worse in urban O than in trad cross-country, but planners and controllers should try to anticipate all possible short-cuts. In the (distant) past we have had manned controls to prevent cheating; electronic punching has removed that need. But crossing out-of-bounds may still be a good short-cut which planners should forestall.

Hear, hear! The planner and controller should do their best to avoid ambiguity and potential for disqualification - unless they want to have a lottery type event where seeing or not seeing a tiny stub of fence or small purple line almost incorporated into a control circle are the deciding factor between doing a good time on a leg or being way off the pace or having to self-disqualify.
By the way - if self disqualification comes in then all a competitor needs do is throw the map away, not check out route gadget and no-one can ever complain about their cheating.

[graeme]

crossing out-of-bounds may still be a good short-cut which planners should forestall...

all very good advice, but you missed the next sentence. Did you mean to say
"by placing a zillion marshals, because we're awash with volunteers these days".
or
"by making the course less interesting for everyone in case someone misreads the map".

[housewife]

I orienteer primarily for fun. Urban races are just that, a bit of fun. As someone who makes an effort with training there are races where i want to really perform well and they are the jk, british champs races selection races and anything abroad i get picked for. at the british sprint champs i would expect there to have been some sort of barrier in the alley (taped probably). in an urban race in a large area with limited volunteers this won't happen. It didn't stop me having a good time. I am quite pleased to have been disqualified. At least i can say i wasn't beaten by graeme!

[awk]

I'm not a "detractor" of urban orienteering, but this kind of situation is one of the main reasons why I haven't tried it, and have no great wish to.

This seems to be a common reason for people not taking it up or deciding it's not for them. Fair enough. Ironically, one of the reasons I enjoy urban-O so much is that there is so much less ambiguity in it: I've lost count of the number of times I've had problems with ambiguous (or plain badly drawn/surveyed) control sites in terrain-O, bingo controls, and any host of other 'interesting' planning/mapping. And as for those landing up in out of bounds areas who then don't declare (I saw half a dozen in one area at the British Champs alone).....

[70plus]

Did you mean to say
"by placing a zillion marshals, because we're awash with volunteers these days".
or
"by making the course less interesting for everyone in case someone misreads the map".

Surely you aren't suggesting that courses are more interesting if there is a better chance of misreading the map? No, I meant that if the course is planned so that the officials are satisfied that they don't need marshals (never mind a zillion) to be sure. Sometimes that may mean a boring control here or there, agreed. Better that than a sour discussion about who should have been disqualified but wasn't.

[RJ]

There are obviously times when uncrossable boundaries are not shown clearly enough, but, for instance, the problem route at Penrith was as clear as a bell, with a solid black line as far as the eye could see!!!!

Urban racing has a different set of skills required for accurate racing. It has a different mapping scheme.... we just have to learn how to interpret them. With time we will become better, but competitors have yet to learn the meaning of something that is not to be crossed.... or at least obey it.

Some time ago we discussed crossing walls on open fell which didn't appear uncrossable on the ground but were not to be crossed because of potential damage and landowner upset. Urban racing makes these situations much more visible and competitors' shortcomings more apparent.

We just need to make it a higher priority in the learning process!!

[graeme]

Surely you aren't suggesting that courses are more interesting if there is a better chance of misreading the map?

Absolutely. Either in urban of forest, the bits where the map is more complicated are the must interesting. Similarly, knowing what errors you expect competitors to make is, to me, an essential part of good forest planning.

Jon's point is right but different: an unclear map is not better than a clear one. They tried an new innovation with the pink lines. It didn't work. Accept it and move on.

RJ makes an excellent observation that this debate is not really different from the old nopesport forest favorite: "uncrossable walls". What we need to learn from that is that the issue wont go away, and we need to think about fair solutions as well as trying to avoid the problem in the first place.

But mainly, urban races are fun, if you're really worried about somebody else half way down the results gaining a few seconds, then you're missing the point. (Though they may be about housewife-beating)

[70plus]

Either in urban or forest, the bits where the map is more complicated are the most interesting.

Yes indeed. But we are discussing complicated bits where overlooking a detail could/should result in disqualification, which does not usually happen in the bits of forest we all like. 'Uncrossable' boundaries are not often found in such places.

If a planner sets a leg across an o-o-b area with an uncrossable boundary, a misbehaving runner is clearly at fault. In an urban race the error may be much harder to spot, and I suppose some planners may be tempted to set deliberate trap legs. If that is what urban runners like, fine; just accept the results and arbitrary disqualifications as part of the fun.

[EddieH]

Jst what is arbitrary about disqualifying someone who you are 100% sure has not completed the course?

[70plus]

Just what is arbitrary about disqualifying someone who you are 100% sure has not completed the course?

Eddie, I meant that not all who 'had not completed the course' may have been disqualified. One out, all out, or it becomes arbitrary.

[andy]

One out, all out, or it becomes arbitrary.

this is the problem.

[EddieH]

Accepted. However do you think that those that own up out, and those that don't is better than those that you are 100% certain out and reaonable doubt in?

Imagine the legal system working like that

[Mrs H]

If you excuse the lengthy post - i'm a bit busy at the moment and don't have time to paraphrase it - but I wrote this in CompassSport a while back

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss.

The Law says Ignorance Is No Defence, and the same, it seems, is true in orienteering. Despite “cheat” being a very ugly word, its one we readily use about anyone who breaks the rules for what ever reason, and there may be many reasons and some of them do not involve any dishonesty.

There are the perennial chestnuts of following, collusion and asking the way, and what about the passing on of information in the assembly field. Only at major events are maps collected so do people show maps to those yet to compete or even utter the words: ”go carefully into number 3”? Of course they do. Mind you that old favourite of taking the controls out of order has now mostly fallen by the wayside thanks to the wonders of new technology.

One of the most common ways of cheating is going out of bounds either deliberately or accidentally. I well remember one of my first orienteering events at Haughmond Hill where a big area of dangerous quarry (well that’s what it said on the map) intrudes on the area like an accusing finger. As I rounded a corner outside the perimeter fence I was astonished to see an experienced orienteer climbing out of the quarry obviously having taken a short cut across it - but I didn’t do anything about it – and that’s part of the problem isn’t it? People mutter “cheat” under their breath but rarely do anything about it. I’m struggling to think of a single occasion when I recall anyone being disqualified by event officials for cheating although I do know of several occasions when a competitor, on subsequently realising they had broken the rules, did the honourable thing and disqualified themselves. I think new technology may have resulted in the muttering getting even louder in recent years. People scrutinise the splits and pick out improbably similar sets or unfeasibly fast ones but how often does anyone actually say anything out loud let alone do anything about it?

Of course cheating is notoriously hard to prove. Take the accusation of following for example; two people on the same course travelling at roughly the same speed are, on occasions at least, likely to choose the same obvious route between controls – give them a mass start like in a relay and the appearance of following is inevitable. Personally I find the situation so distracting that I actually start looking for the less obvious route to get away from other people, fortunately, travelling rather slowly, I usually don’t have company for long. More and varied gaffles are the answer – preferably not all meeting at an inadequate number of boxes at the third control.

The advent of urban racing has opened up a whole new can of worms when it comes to cheating and one which is making a lot of people mutter. The main problem is that some of the new mapping practices are different to the old established ones and hinge on what must not be crossed as opposed to what appears to be crossable – it’s all to do with permissions and health and safety and tedious stuff like that but it is absolutely crucial for the continuation of this burgeoning branch of the sport that the rules are adhered to. I think the case here is not Ignorance Is No Defence but Ignorance Is The Offence and on occasions even Arrogance Is The Offence as a lot of established orienteers are not bothering to bone up on their ISSOM specifications before taking part in events. If you don’t think you know it all, and more especially if you do think you know it all, take another detailed look at last edition’s excellent article Forbidden Features by Adrian Zissos. I am trying to school myself to pick out the olive green areas and solid thick black lines at the very start of my route choice process now in the hope that avoiding them will become instinctive. Unfortunately there may be some orienteers out there who don’t actually read CompassSport and for them I think the only answer is to hand out cards with the various ISSOM uncrossable and OOB symbols at the start and physically make people look at them before they are admitted to the start boxes.

Now, although the law says that ignorance is no defence, it also, somewhat paradoxically to my mind, acknowledges the importance of Criminal Intent in sentence if not conviction, for which I’m grateful as I think it is an important distinction. An honest mistake is not punished in the same way as a crime.

I wonder whether the stigma of appearing as “Dsq” in the results actually stops some people owning up when they realise they have made a mistake or been so lost they didn’t know they were breaking the rules, because it sounds intrinsically dishonest. I would like to see some tightening up on the actual reasons why people don’t complete their courses – mp, rtd, dnf – fine but in addition to Dsq I would like to see the option of Withdrawn – which would be an honourable state. Someone comes to you after a race and says :”Did you know that the wall you climbed was marked as uncrossable on the map” and you look in horror and realise they are right, then you can go and tell the download team you wish to withdraw your result. It might also be quite a useful deterrent to those who knew the wall was uncrossable but didn’t realise they had been seen doing it as obviously too many withdrawals from this goodwill account will soon make you appear morally bankrupt. It also makes it easier for someone to actually accuse someone of cheating by giving them the benefit of the doubt over whether they did it deliberately or not.

While we have to hope that all events are planned to minimise the benefit of as many kinds of cheating as possible, I would also like to be sure that event officials know how to deal with an accusation of cheating and not just at major events (I’m making the rather large assumption here that there is a protocol at every level of competition).

I foresee that at some time in the future technology will once again come to our rescue and Version 20 SI cards will have integral GPS trackers which will reveal at download whether anyone has been somewhere they shouldn’t. Ahh! GPS there’s an interesting can or worms yet to be fully opened!

You can only consciously obey the rules if you know what they are – but the onus is on you to find out what the rules are. The Law says Ignorance is No Defence so whether you think The Law is an Ass or a Pons Asinorum will largely depend on whether you know you can cross that particular bridge before you come to it.

[Mrs H]

....and on the subject of complaints protocol. someone i know tried to get themselves disqualified recently when it was pointed out to them that they had cheated. The planner told her that because she was not in the top three it didn't matter. The controller was aware of the situation, but it seemed neither of them did the right thing and informed the person they needed to consult the event organiser first. If event officials can't be bothered to point people in the right direction then it's hardly surprising people are so reluctant to make a complaint if they think they won't be taken seriously and just branded a trouble maker

[andy]

However do you think that those that own up out, and those that don't is better than those that you are 100% certain out and reaonable doubt in?

Imagine the legal system working like that

No, it's crazy. But I don't think retrospectively applying rules like this is a good way forward, the controller is in a horrible situation and I get the feeling he might let the results stand (I haven't heard otherwise yet anyway).

I think this is a problem further up when it comes to guidelines and resources so hopefully we can do something about it at an SOA level to help prevent it happening again. As housewife said it's not an important race, just for fun. I see a few people got held up by a gate being shut that was meant to be open, it is just 'one of those things'. I think we have to write off little discrepancies like these, make an effort to avoid them happening again but make every effort possible to ensure they don't happen at the really big events.