WTOC 2012

[cbg]

Day 2 and overall results posted - http://www.scottish-orienteering.org/wtoc2012/results

Particular congratulations to Ian Ditchfield for a fine 3rd, faultless, place today and a podium (5th) place overall. Neither can John Kewley have disgraced himself with 11th overall, with just one error on Day 2. Well done lads ... er ... gentlemen.

Just waiting for the solutions to be posted ....

[Paul Frost]

Apologies for the delay in getting reports posted and more of the maps/solutions online.
The organising team was pretty stretched during the event, with many people having multiple jobs. This often meant being on site at 7:30 to setup stuff, having a "day job" and still being there at the end to take it down. So not much time to write about what was happening at the time.

I'm hoping to get all the map/solution files from the planners etc. and publish them asap.
I have some more photos from Day 1 taken by Nick Barrable which I'm about to upload. If anyone else has any good shots you think worth sharing you can email them to me at paul.frost 'at' scottish-orienteering.org or send me a link to any Flickr, Picasa etc. photo sharing sites.

[frog]

Looking forward to seeing the public results from day 2 as couldn't remember my answers for many so have no idea how many I got right. Bumped into Andy on the way round.
I note the winner of the paraolympic class wasn't in a wheelchair and I wonder if wheelchair competitors are at a disadvantage in this. I was back and forth alot and jumping up and down trying to work out what was where and I can imagine that if you are lower down and finding it hard work pushing yourself around the course/ asking your pusher to keep going back and forth it does put you at a disadvantage.
I can see why you need so much time for it, although mappingmum was waiting for me in the car so I thought I'd better not take 2 1/4 hours over it.
The Z option (none of the above) caught me out a few times when all the controls were on the wrong feature. 16 was deceptive as the depression the controls were on isn't supposed to have any boulders and yet there were boulders in it just like the other depression. Will have to have another look at it when I'm next at tentsmuir, presume the real boulders are much more obvious. Looking at the map it's obvious it was the nearer depression I was looking at, but I think I got confused as to where I was on the map after going up to 14 and 15.
It is all incredibly time consuming and volunteer heavy though. Must be the most labour intensive minority sport out there.
I don't think Tay will be putting one on soon.
How did someone think up this sport and manage to get an international competition going? Has it been going long?

[JK]

frog:
Wheelchairs have a disadvantage since they are inherently less mobile. OTOH they can also be faster in some terrain than some of the upright slow people (like the winner). They were probably faster on Sat, but not on Sun as it was sandy. BTW I am not referring to the tetraplegic guys who need to be pushed all the way unless they have their motorised wheelchairs with them - this year they were without them.

Regarding depression with blocks in. All the boulders were way less than kite height and therefore were under the mapping limit of 1m - so they shouldn't have been mapped, and weren't.

JK

[JK]

For the record:

Ian's 7th in the world TempO trophy beats the previous GB best of 9th.

Also, his 5th place beats the previous GB best in WTOC Open of 7th (John Crosby)

So an excellent all-round performance.

On behalf of the GB team I'd like to thank all the WTOC 2012 volunteers, many who worked all day every day so that the event went as smoothly as it did. I'd also like to thanks those of you who sent their wishes before and during the event. The whole squad are now looking forward to next year where TempO will be a full WTOC championship discipline in Finland.

JK

[Drumlough]

"Will have to have another look at it when I'm next at tentsmuir, presume the real boulders are much more obvious"

Chances are the "real boulders" aren't actually there since they could not have been seen from the trail.

[frog]

They'll still be there though, even if not visible from the trail. It'll be interesting to compare the size of the real and pretend boulders.
The chance of me remembering to take my trail o map when next in tentsmuir with me is near zero though.

[JK]

It doesn't really matter if the real ones actually exist or not, although I think they will.

The key points were:

• Kites were in the wrong depression
• Kites were too close to the path / decision point
• Kites were on features that were too small to be mapped
• the boulders (as I recall) were not in the same orientation as the other ones

It is for this final reason that I suspect that the real ones exist. Check the solutions map and course map - the mapped boulders should have had the closer 2 closer to each other than the 3rd one, and vice versa in the real depression.

[IanD]

For the record:...

JK is too modest to mention his own performance, finishing in the top dozen for the second consecutive World Championship, the two competitions having been vastly different in terms of terrain and planning style. Form is temporary but class is permanent.

I'd like to echo his thanks to all the officials. But also to point out to those who may be contemplating putting on a TrailO that a lesser standard of event would not need quite so much manpower.

[AnneH]

Apologies to everyone waiting to see the results from the public event on TrailO day2. These will be available later today.

Paul is making an understatement when saying that the manpower was pretty stretched. The key workers were at it every day from 7.30 in the forest until we went to bed. Paul is also correct that we should have had someone responsible for providing daily reports, but not many people actually knew enough about TrailO to report on what was going on and those that did had to give priority to keeping the event running.

We had about 90 helpers in all (not all of them every day), nearly as many as the competitors. A lot of them had to do several jobs, and a lot of them will be avoiding me in future in case I ask them to do anything similar again Everyone did a fantastic job and I think we succeeded in putting on a good championships for the competitors and keeping up the reputation of Scotland/Britain for high quality events.

But this was the world champs. A small local TrailO event could be put on with half a dozen - wheelchair users could bring their own escort, a timed control could be run with just a couple of people.

TrailO will never get going over here unless a lot more people get to try it. Perhaps the people who've done the public events at WTOC will feel inspired to put out a few trailO controls as an extra at their club events. It can be a useful coaching exercise too - for youngsters it can be used to help them learn map symbols and control descriptions, for improvers a tool to improve map interpretation skills. I've already told the powers-that-be that some planning guidelines for TrailO are needed.

[andypat]

Had a look at the info on the website, including the results and it looks fiendishly complicated. Wonder if thats what "foot" orienteering looks like to the uninitiated?!

I read there was a protest about the positioning of the controls at control 1. Any chance of some further info about this Anne? Mainly because I am imagining the protest being along the lines of - that control was 6cm out of position so the answer was Z kind of thing...

[JK]

Andypat:
I can fill you in on a bit about control 1.

It was one of those controls that needed ultra-precision to solve as the kites were very close and there weren't really any lining up features to nail a kite to the centre of the circle. It was also tricky working out the precise centre of the circle.

This sort of control is only fair if the feature is perfectly mapped and the kites perfectly placed.

My gut feel looking at it for 10s was that I (given the information that i had from the path which can of course be confusing) would have placed the kite 1/2 way between B and C. 12 mins later and I decided (like many of the top competitors) that C was closer so i went for it. Others (like ian) went for B. The FINs protested and the Jury concluded that the centre of the circle was between B and C (and If I recall close to the mid point than either end) and so it was unfair and voided the control.

Control 9 on day 1 (as well as several others) had some kites that were a bit close together for my liking, but only one of the kites was "round the corner" in the depression, and lined up with the bushes to the W and on the centre line of the depression - so it was OK.

Hopefully there will be some photos of these control clusters available at some point so you can see how fiendish (and I am not using that in a negative sense) some of the controls, especially on day 1, were.

JK

[andypat]

JK
Thanks - sounds tricky.
I dont understand the rules that well but given what youve described as the serious difficulty in determining whether it was B or C, why did absolutely noone put Z? Does the have to be a minimum distance away to count as a zero answer?

[JK]

Anypat:

They were so close that Z would have been unfair too. There has to be a clear reason for a Z. The between the spurs one was < 1 m away, but as it wasn't [quite] between the spurs it was clear enough for me (and all the other competitors who looked at the kites from that angle) to say Z.

In this case since there was a kite (ahem possibly 3 kites) that matched the description and were near enough the centre of the circle - then that wasn't good enough for a Z.

[Paul Frost]

Public results for Day 2 public now available.