Southern Champs BKO

[Mrs H]

Well that's fine then isn't it why are you all getting so het up about a suggestion that doesn't event apply in this situation. If the control had not been put out I thought it was a fairly common sense solution to salvage some positive feeling out of the situation.

I asked (3 times) how the control came to be missing. No one answered you merely asked why it made a difference and I said why - don't know how you get a witch hunt out of that.

[EddieH]

Am I alone in believing the rules to be wrong?

Of course most of us set out to run the course as fast as we can. Very few people want courses to be voided - it leaves a thoroughly dissatisfying feeling for almost everyone. In any case where a control is wrong or missing it seems pretty disrespectful to say "Joe Bloggs is not going to win so we will disregard the fact his race is ruined" (Indeed I remember a controller instating a known elite runner who finished a night championships having lost his control card on the say so that he had been to them all, and saying to me that had it been anyone else of course he would not have instated them )

As DJM says we all do some legs better than others, and results may be changed by removing legs, but it is still a test of skill and speed, even if not quite the one that we thought we were doing at the time. Is it fair to remove 2 legs - of course its not 100% so, but is it so very unfair? and is it better than voiding or letting the results stand? In my view any of the 3 might be the best choice, but voiding would only be the most satisfactory solution in a very rare situation. Letting results stand, or removing legs would depend very much on the attitude of those affected, and in the case of major races on the apparent effect either has on the winner.

[pete.owens]

I think the rules have the balance right - and therefore been applied to void the class (not the course).

There are circumstances when it is better to take out splits (for example in a team competition such as the CSC where everyones results are equally important) or for lower level events where we are competing at a more recreational level. However, at top level competitions where the aim is to find a champion then you cannot really try to double guess what the result would have been had the problem not occurred.

Also, there should be no pressure on complainants to withdraw because it would spoil it for everyone else. This simply isn't the case - everybody else has had the run they paid for. The list of competitors completing the course with their times should still be published so effectively there is still a set of results and they can see how they performed against the field. The only difference is that no trophy would be awarded either to the competitor completing the course in the fastest time or to the competitor completing the part of the course the jury deemed to be unaffected.

As it is we have an M45 southern champion who feels he doesn't deserve the title - but would it really be any more satisfactory for a champion to win a trophy by virtue of adjusted results. Perhaps the trophy should go to the runner up in the M50 class who beat both of them whichever way you adjust it.

[sketchweppers]

And whilst we at it, should 3rd place in M50 go to Clive H? or did he really punch a control 3km from the one he was supposed to punch?! (That's what the results state)

Similarly on course 11, there are two chaps on M50S who have mispunched the same incorrect control 202 instead of controls 229 and 191 which were about 1.5 km apart. I can't work out where 202 was as there are no control codes on the splits files, but it seems unlikely that it can have been close to both 229 and 191.

[NeilC]

202 (control 13 on M45/50L) was very close to 191. A long way from 229.

[roadrunner]

Am I alone in believing the rules to be wrong?

No, I don't think you are. There are some cases where removing splits is obviously fair - for example, if the missing control was towards the end of the course, then taking times to the previous control just has the effect of shortening the course a bit. Even when that isn't the case, I still think it's the last unfair approach provided that the competitors know in advance that it's what will happen. If you knew that, and were someone with a chance of winning (therefore pretty confident of your navigation), you'd know not to waste too much time (and energy) looking for a control that seemed to be missing: better to carry on. If the control was missing, you would have given yourself the best chance of winning; if it was there and you were in the wrong place, then you'd probably have lost so much time looking before you found it that you wouldn't have won anyway.

I do think that orienteering sometimes gets too hung up on the quest for absolute fairness, when that isn't possible: late starters get the benefit of "elephant tracks", and changes in the weather can benefit either early or late starters. Other sports don't seem so concerned: for example, in the 400m there's generally held to be an advantage in having certain lanes (especially on an indoor 200m track), but no-one seems unduly bothered about this.

[roadrunner]

202 (control 13 on M45/50L) was very close to 191. A long way from 229.

Might it be that one competitor punched 202 believing it to be 191, while the other punched 202, realised his mistake and punched 191, but then missed 229? This is another area where SI (or rather, the SI software) is better than Emit in my opinion: the results show the control code for the incorrect controls and the time they were punched, which makes it a lot easier to see what happened. (SI still has its anomalies, though: in the Brighton race my punch at one of the butterfly controls (15) failed to register, which was shown as controls 20-23 missing!)

[BOK_has_been]

Perhaps the trophy should go to the runner up in the M50 class who beat both of them whichever way you adjust it.

I was the runner up in M50 (Phil Murray = me) and I'm quite happy to go home with second place M50, but thanks for the thought!

Ifor is a clubmate, and Alan Velecky & I go back decades (we were in SOC together in the late 1970s.....!), so for me (late enough start to have been unaffected by this shambles) it's just a shame that there appears to be no true "winner" ....

Phil Murray (BOK)