World Cup Round 3

[Snail]

Even with simple gaffles, if random following could give say a 75% chance of disqualification but a 25% chance of winning, it might be attractive to some! Some countries might even decide to try entering athletics / cross country champions rather than orienteers.

There really ought to be enough gaffles / loops that everyone has to read the map throughout - simple choices of something like east/west pit, or pairs of controls on opposite sides of the street, would be sufficient.

[Gross]

Some countries might even decide to try entering athletics / cross country champions rather than orienteers.

Wouldn't work

Before WOC 95 in Detmold there were some top Kenyan runners in an experiment against orienteers with the athletes following the orienteers. They couldn't keep up in the terrain & it was nice clean beech forest .

[Scott]

Some countries might even decide to try entering athletics / cross country champions rather than orienteers.

What kind of country (or educational institution) would stoop to such low tactics?

lost_en_route_to_the_start_kite.png (38.57 KiB) Viewed 9454 times

[Scott]

At the extreme, you could even have invisible (hidden) controls, with the contestants only knowing that they were in the correct place when it flashed up on a wristwatch...

Now that I definitely would watch - particularly with all the potential for throwing people off by faking a punch.

[housewife]

The invisible control idea could indeed prove fun!

The question to ask though is who do you want to hand your WOC medals to? The best orienteer, or the best XC runner? Because if Daniel Hubmann has a choice between middle, or middle prologue and chasing final, which do you think he’d prioritise? How about the other top orienteers? What do you think their choice would be? By introducing these disciplines in which the top athletes don’t necessarily want to compete, you risk devaluing the whole competition.

I think it will also be interesting to see how the woc middle / long split will be affected by the fact that you have a middle qualification next year (which presumably determines start times in the final) and not a long qualification (where forest world ranking presumably determines the start time). Anyone without a strong enough forest world ranking to get a good start time in woc long (GG, Kris?) is massively incentivised to skip the long and to do the middle instead. More depth / better competition in the middle, the long more the preserve of the wealthy nations that can afford to schlep around the world cups picking up world ranking points.

[Guest88]

Yes, I have seen Daniel Hubmann's facebook comments, and some of the others - they didn't seem too keen on that race.

In my opinion - and it is only an opinion, a format designed for TV and format designed to find the best orienteer in the world are always going to be 2 different aims. There is a reason why millions upon millions of people tune into watch football matches every weekend aside from the high degree of skill on display - it is a pretty high variance sport. On any given day, the best team does not always win. It is the fact that the result isn't known, and anything can happen, that keeps people glued. Noone watches last year's premier league matches.

A format to find the best orienteer in the world is quite low variance - so the best orienteer in the world might win a high percentage of the time. Whereas if you are desiging a snappy format for TV, you would ideally want it to be higher variance to make it more exciting. Of course this means that it is less likely that the best orienteer would win - but we still have the long distance race if we want to see who the best in the world is.

[Bash]

I thoroughly enjoyed the new format and have become very excited at the prospect of it being introduced more regularly into the sport. Watching the video of the sprint finish in the Men's Pursuit and seeing the pain on everyone's face, and knowing how much the win would mean to all of them gives me goosebumps - I don't think I've ever seen such exciting footage of orienteering before.

Pursuit Finish

And my experience of running in one of the lower down, but nonetheless gruesomely quick packs is of an incredibly high-stake race of getting to that finish line as fast as possible, which is sometimes easy to forget in traditional, individual orienteering races. I personally had my map out on every leg, trying to take as many micro-routes as possible to stay in touch with the train, and ready to pounce on any macro-routechoice that I deemed good enough to be worth the risk.

I don't agree with the point that the best sprinter gets the win. Lind and Lundanes are by no means the fastest finishers in the starting field, and there wasn't anyone in that front finishing group that hadn't already performed outstandingly in the traditional disciplines. The winners are those who have best survived the heavy terrain, have taken the correct decisions, and have not been dropped in the long run up to the final sprint (as many strong 'followers' were). To say the best sprint finisher won it is to say that the best sprint finisher always wins in any half marathon after there has been a leading pack for 20km. It isn't always true, and it disregards the rest of the race which has been much tougher than the finale.

I do however agree that the Pursuit favours better terrain runners more than in the individual disciplines. This is clear, but is this so bad? New champions get crowned, new exciting tactics emerge, and the sport becomes more synonymous with speed and toughness, rather than the traditional viewpoint that we're a bunch of lycra-clad scouts who use maps to search for treasure. To say this format doesn't hold potential also pretty much disregards Relay running, as although there is additional gaffling in relays, the Pursuit race pretty much links up the formats of the 'long night' and final legs in starting and finishings arrangement respectfully in 10mila or most big relays. Note also that the last legs of relays rarely have much gaffling in the second half of their races anyway...

Joey H's run with his unopened map does make a very clear point though, and there is definite need for adjustments (I really hope for his sake that that's what he was trying to prove...). But relatively straightforward solutions exist, to open up and develop a new exciting discipline with arguably the most dramatic footage for all spectatorship, both familiar with orienteering and not. (Although this isn't at all a priority of the vast majority of orienteers, it's crucially important for the sport to develop both internationally and here at home.)

Suggested improvements:

1 - Fewer runners - Easily done, WOC would likely have a maximum of 3 per country, rather than up to 8(!) at this WC.

2 - Highly Technical Prologue - Competitors prove themselves in the prologue and earn their spots in the Pursuit, with only 'real' orienteers starting close enough to the front to stand a chance of getting podium. Bigger start gaps in the Prologue would ensure this too, as there was still several trains at this WC. Also more easily achieved with a smaller field. Keep the doubling of the margin behind the leader though, this worked well, and allows for a shorter prologue and therefore better scheduling of both races in the same day, which also tests a tough new aspect for forest orienteers.

3 - High level of Routechoice in Pursuit. Essentially resembling a sprint race with the level of RC, although understandably not all terrain could deliver this. Packs get split, risks get taken, followers' chances of making it to the podium reduces with every additional pack split...

... but as mentioned already: even if any followers last until the end, good on them. They're clearly incredibly strong terrain runners and they've already proved themselves navigationally by making it through a (hopefully) very technical prologue within touching distance of the intermediate leader. It's essentially a fact that terrain speed endurance is the main characteristic of a champion orienteer these days, almost always taking priority over navigational capacity which just about all runners have to [approximately] the same level. WOC winners are regularly the strongest, fastest terrain bashers anyway, so why not prioritise [but not single out] this characteristic in a new format?

[Scott]

A format to find the best orienteer in the world is quite low variance - so the best orienteer in the world might win a high percentage of the time. Whereas if you are desiging a snappy format for TV, you would ideally want it to be higher variance to make it more exciting.

I believe that is the (unspoken?) principle behind the mixed sprint relay - with relatively fine margins and a whole hour to make a dramatic oxygen-deprived running-down-a-dead-end mistakes, the results should be more unpredictable than either individual sprint or forest relay.

Highly Technical Prologue - Competitors prove themselves in the prologue and earn their spots in the Pursuit, with only 'real' orienteers starting close enough to the front to stand a chance of getting podium. Bigger start gaps in the Prologue would ensure this too, as there was still several trains at this WC. Also more easily achieved with a smaller field.

The consistency of the standard at the top means that you're often going to end up with a lot of people with very similar times over 20 minutes of orienteering in the prologue. Packs are therefore going to be difficult to avoid, even if the athletes do have to earn their place in them.

If you run really well in the prologue and manage to go out with a significant lead in the chase, running on your own is going to put you at a big disadvantage against the inevitable chasing pack (cf. långa natten). What you really want to do in the prologue is to run well, but not to run a lot better than everyone else...

If you're good enough to earn a big lead in the prologue and then keep clear of the pack in the chase (e.g. because you're Tove), quite a bit of the novel spectator interest of the format vanishes.

If this format is going to have a future, I think it needs to embrace the fact that packs on the chase are unavoidable - and, in fact, are part of the fun. But to make it really interesting to watch, it does need to do something - big routechoices, forked loops, choose-a-control, taking the control codes off the map and putting lots of extra dummy controls in the terrain - to shake up those packs during the final, rather than just leaving them to agglomerate for twenty minutes and then sprint to the finish line.

[DIDSCO]

I'll agree with Bash on many points, but I would say it is no surprise Lind won, he probably is the fastest finisher in the field and has proved this on many occasions over the last 10 years. When Bash states 'all runners have approx navigational capacity' I assume he means 'all runners' at the very top end, and I'll agree with that.

Now with WOC 2019 just in the forest and in Nordic terrain it's going to be really important for our British runners to prepare well for this competition. Without a doubt our best chance for a medal is in the mens relay, and then Ralph in the middle. I understand at least 2 of the possible relay team live in the U.K. These guys need to get out in the Norwegian terrain as much as possible over the next year if we're to have a chance -inc. with coaches Liz, Eddie so they get quality training. That's is costly. What can British orienteering do to support these guys and coaches? The crowd funding initiative brought in a lot of money for the actual World Champs, which is great, but these guys need to be supported over next year so they can do the necessary training to be competitive at WOC.( I've already told Ralph I can pick up runners at Gothenburg airport and they're welcome to stay a night or two at my house when needed, will even lay on training when required). It would be interesting to hear from our top runners and coaches so they can tell us what they need support with.

[graeme]

I thoroughly enjoyed the new format

I'm glad you like the so-called "new format" of a 45 min winning time chasing race. Whoever would have thought of such a thing?

(not that I enjoyed getting passed by DIDSCO on a sprint finish)