E-punching & innovation

[PKJ]

How much impact has electronic punching had on the way courses are planned or the type of events which are held? I came back into orienteering in 2003, and I don’t travel much, but I haven’t noticed much difference – perhaps I just don’t know.

Once, we knew when someone started and when they finished, with maybe a manned control or two, and that was it. Now we know how long everyone took for each leg, the order they punched controls, their position on each leg, or at any point in the race - if we were starting out with that knowledge, what would events be like?

As a competitor, I’m quite happy to re-visit the good parts of an area, or to have ‘stages’ of fully-timed orienteering separated by time-limited legs to get me from one area to another (like rally stages). Do we now have more flexibility on where and how events can be held, to help organisation or publicity? Or is this just extra complexity which we don’t need?

Or – ‘all controls are equal, but some controls are more equal than others’. As we all know, many courses have some good bits and some padding. Could we give an extra reward to competitors who do well on some parts of the course? For example, having a ‘course within a course’, or time bonuses (like cycle-racing catch-sprints), say for the best 10 on a key route-choice leg or through a key section.

So, what’s been tried? What works? Or, should we just leave well alone?

[bendover]

see 'micr-o' as used at recent nordic champs.

http://www.noc2005.org/index.shtml

and look at bulletin 4.

[RJ]

Being able to use smaller areas, or small sections of a large mapped area. Courses using a figure eight, or several cross-overs. The main advantage of the electronic system is the ability to plan better and more interesting courses. With the controls packed into a tighter sized area it reduces the work of the planner.

We have certainly, over the last six years, used many 'fun' formats, which have used the electronics to the max.

One format involved five groups of four controls, separated by a long leg. Each group was collected in any order. This can also be a score type event, with each entire group only counting, and collected within time.

Another involved a straightforward cross country course with an extra five controls off line. You had to visit three of the five at any time.

And then there was snooker-O, and barbells.....

[FatBoy]

I'd say there's lots of potential for fun formats, and to do things like timed out road crossings a lot more easily.

However I think there's far too many crossovers for the sake of crossovers. I do find it very annoying to go within 50 metres of controls 12 and 13 on the way to 4 - it takes some of the challenge of those later controls away.

[SLOW]

I think there is a danger in Sport Ident in that the most common software only includes standard courses. To have score events for example requires more sophisticated software and hence you need to pay SportSoftware more £££.

[FatBoy]

you need to pay SportSoftware more £££.

or me

Seriously though other software products are available, and indeed are other hardware products.

[PKJ]

Hmm – I may have overdone the ‘idiot question’ approach. I think we’ve always been creative at fun & informal events. I was mainly interested to see which ideas and experiments from these will find their way into the mainstream events on the calendar.

Any chance of Micr-o getting onto Eurosport?

[Ant W]

That was why I was excited to see Micr-O, given the excellent coverage of biathlon by Eurosport. The dream of watching orienteering live on UK TV seems to be getting closer!

[RJ]

Yep, see what you mean PKJ.

The system allows more extensive use a particular area, and carefully controls which controls are visited, when and in what order. This has the potential for greater spectator appeal particularly when the controls are linked in real time to central computing and display.

Micr-O might be an exciting format, but it involves live computer linkage during the race, and then human intervention for the forfeit laps. Will obviously work for small numbers of competitors and high profile events, but would be impracticable for large numbers.

The way forward with the technology is not necessarily with the creation of new formats but to display to the watching audience what the current position of the race is. Just having one spectator control or a radio control greatly increases the anticipation and excitement.

A TV audience requires an analysis of a changing situation in real time. They need to have current information even if it is boring (like two hours of watching the leaders in a marathon from the back of a motorbike!). Cameras at control sites and GPS when harnessed effectively will do more for the sport than a fancy format which bastardises 'proper' O.