Discussion: WOC 2016 Sprints

Sweden changes the embargo rules for WOC 2016 sprints. This surely benefits the host nation and those other countries nearby and those countries with the resources to 'explore' until November 1st.

As Thierry tweets "Rule nr1: never change the rules of the game when the game has already started... #woc2016"

Follow the controversy here:

https://twitter.com/worldofo/status/63878301314967...

And it gets worse (as Nicolas Simonin tweets below) because the host nation just happens to be in town training this week. Yikes the optics here aren't that great Sweden.

"Perfect timing to release news now that #världensbästalandslag are on #woc2016 camp this week in Strömstad #FairPlay"

Sounds similar to the recent WRC where the Finns apparently had access to the start area prior to the event even though it was supposedly embargoed. Apparently this allowed several teams to get a good direction out of the start by avoiding the marshes.

Not a particularly smart move!
I´m with Thierry on this one.

tRicky, bulletin 5 gives states it is allowed to drive along the public roads (those one can drive with normal car) and also start area has no embargo stripes in the embargo map. I am not surprised some thought visiting start area is OK, especially those with no rogaining experience and not knowing how things usually are executed, I wouldn't blame them too much.

Seems like it was experienced teams that got the advantage by knowing which way to head our from the start but then I wasn't there and this was second-hand info so I probably can't comment more!

I certainly won't be visiting Alice Springs prior to next year's WRC but then at this stage I won't be there either.

Wait until the non-Europeans go home
Hold your training camp
Then embargo the area
How fair is that?

About as fair as "major" (i.e. Olympic) sports such as speed skating, luge, bobsleigh where the host nation somehow gets to have more training time on the run than any other country?

I take offence at being called a "syrup sucker".

@AZ, It worked! We won the podium or in Swedish
#världensbästalandslag

http://blog.fagstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/0...

Seems to me a minor issue given the ability of anyone to build maps of sprint venues using the resources available on the net. If you were serious about winning you would be mad not to make the effort.

This pretty much sums it all up...

http://tuelassen.blogspot.se/2015/09/woc-sprint-pr...

WTF!
Just a few days ago a young Florida orienteer and high school team leader wrote to ask me for a copy of a new map that will be used for a competition at the end of October.
I carefully (and naively) explained to him that the essence of orienteering is 'self-chosen route through unknown terrain'. I explained that for major competitions there is something called an embargo which forbids future participants from scouting a competition area with a map, any map. I could have added that it is mostly an honour (honor) code that prevents violations. I said that in that spirit I could not share with him a copy of the map.
How naive was I! Now I see that the Danish team made their own maps of the 2015 Sprint area. If they did one has to assume that other teams did as well.
Using on-line tools such as Open Street Mapper, Google Earth and Google Streetview it is dead easy to make one's own orienteering map of most urban areas of the world, Dartmouth College venue for the 2016 NAOC, for example. But just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Testing an embargoed orienteering area with a self-made map seems to me to be on the same level as the use of performance enhancing substances. So which was the best of the 'clean' teams at Nairn, etc?

Using any maps in the terrain was prohibited, and it seems like it would have been really risky to try to actually run around with a map considering how many other teams were also walking around. The teams were able to spend enough time walking around the terrain that they could remember the areas and transfer knowledge to their maps.

I do agree that the sprint areas should be embargoed. No visiting in advance. But why wouldn't you try to make a map of an area using publicly available data if you could? Doesn't everybody look at USGS topos of an area before the first meet there? GoogleMaps with street view before a sprint? I've certainly used publicly available lidar data to make my own maps in advance, just to give me an idea of what the terrain will be like. The actual maps are still secret, the terrain is still unknown. And you still have to run fast and find the controls.

Of course you shouldn't share a new map with competitors before the competition. That's the sweetest situation, running on a map that no one has had a chance to run on before! But of course people are also going to try to get a feel for the challenges they'll face in advance, it's a competitive sport!

All sprints should be at uni campuses to prevent the use of Streetview :-)

All sprints should be in a forest. Area embargoed to ALL, well in advance. Problem solved. I'm putting money on there being a forest sprint at a "Forest WOC" within 6 years.

Tue's blog post was certainly enlightening. I don't think you can blame him for exploiting to the full the rules as they currently exist.

The IOF released a discussion paper (written by yours truly) on this subject late last year. Judging by the distinctly underwhelming number of comments we received on the paper, I'm guessing that not too many of you have read it :-). Our overall conclusion was that a full embargo (possibly with a small training window shortly before the event) was desirable, but that any rule trying to outlaw the use of Google Street View or the like would be unenforceable, and that altering the "terrain" (e.g. through the use of fences) was also a worthwhile option.

We didn't finalise that until last month, by which time, of course, the initial Swedish embargo rules had already been published. I think everyone's now in agreement that it would have been better for the terrain to have been embargoed from the start, but given that that hasn't happened (as the Irish saying goes, "if you want to go there I wouldn't be starting from here"), the question is how to get the fairest possible outcome from the point that we're at now. (Relevant to this is that a fair proportion of the world's best orienteers live within an hour or two of the venue, and in the absence of any rule to stop them would be able to train there just about every week).

(Should add here that the actual Swedish decision was made by the organisers and the SEA, not more broadly in the IOF or any of its commissions).

@tRicky: unfortunately, some campuses have pretty good Street Views generated by cameras mounted on bikes. In our club, Jeff Teutsch made a training map of a campus based on Street View and it was very adequate.

@Lard: I don't think there will be forest sprints in major competitions. There is no way to map all the minor variations of runnability in a forest in a way that would be fair for a short race where fractions of a second matter.

Hmm, you must live in a more popular area than what I do then. We're lucky if we get StreetView just for road traffic updated every couple of years!

Here is a Google street view of McMaster University campus showing Emma Waddington (AdventureGirl! on AP) (then 13) at a kids summer sports camp back in 2011.

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2669488,-79.916329...

It looks like she can't find the soccer pitch. I guess her nav has improved over time.

RIT one of the first campuses to be covered with street view Fall 2010.
Was used for the WDOC 2015 and street view used by athletes and for pre-planning of course setting and mapping.

With a look at the trike camera
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0851335,-77.675554...

Note to self: Embargo a variety of sprint venues near my house and then try to get copies of the worked up maps from the various teams.

How embarassing for Sweden if they don't win both sprints!

From forest sprints -> to sprints in old towns -> upgraded to sprints everywhere with artificial fences -> to Labyrinth orienteering on a soccer stadium is where the story ends and qualifications in a basketball hall.

Two words: Corn Maze.

You haven't counted on wheat view.

Would it be feasible to just not tell anyone where exactly the sprint will be, as opposed to trying to enforce any kind of embargo? If the sprint were advertised to be "somewhere within a roughly 2hr drive of Strömstad", would teams prepare by mapping and visiting every village in the area?

bshields, I don't they would map every village in the area - instead they would go out any every existing map of those villages and train. The result would be that you would have to host in a town without an existing map.

Alternatively, as has been suggested previous, you embargo a dozen different towns and don't tell which one is the race site.

What options do we have to define embargo?

Embargo should be valid from the day on when IOF choose the WOC candidate. Embargo is a problem only for athletes who live in a city or near by. For others is just an information that if you are not the resident or student or....that you shouldn't visit the city. A simple form with key criteria should be prepared to see the situation for each team in advance. To see for how many runners this could be a problem. If they can't avoid the area on a daily basis than I suppose the best way it would be to exclude them from running sprint. For all others a simple honour letter should be prepared; what is expected from you and that IOF might agree on appropriate fine. We are too much living only the rules and what is allowed and what is not allowed. In many sports they have unwritten fair play rules which I prefer and where all players know where is a limit. Just look at recent incident in Tennis.... There was no rule what you can say and can't say but he got a fine.

If IOF would have such attitude towards elite the Danes and others would be DSQ. Maybe we need to write down a Fair play rules as it is clear that with no rules there is no respect right now. For instance, exclusion from WOC or next WOCs.

Ok, but mapping capacity could be be distributed among enough people that a dozen previously unmapped areas can be mapped by streetview (sounds like the Danish team could handle it easily enough). So then it's a question of how much total terrain is required to overwhelm the memorization capacity of an individual athlete.

The problem with embargoing "everywhere" is that the teams have to stay somewhere. (That's the way it used to happen - for example, the WOC 1985 embargo was essentially all forests in the state of Victoria not already on existing orienteering maps, with the exact venue not being announced until the day beforehand - but you can really only do that for forests). It would also be a lot harder to keep a venue secret these days - you can't erect all the infrastructure for a modern WOC overnight, plus things like road closures would have to be advertised in advance (something else you don't have to do for a forest WOC).

Having multiple embargoed towns would work in some places (I think that's what Estonia have done for 2017), but not others. Hard to imagine more than two or three other towns within plausible reach of Inverness that could have been likely sprint venues for 2015.

I am very skeptical about the feasibility of embargoing several towns in countries where the density of orienteers is relatively high. As a reminder, embargos aren't only meant for athletes, but also for all team members and trainers. For having participated in discussions about the embargo in Lausanne prior to WOC 2012, I can say that drawing the embargo area was close to a nightmare. Pushing it a bit more to the east, west or south lead to people being automatically excluded (or excluding others) from WOC, because they studied there, worked there, travelled through there, etc. In the end the embargo area had to be much more narrow than initially planned or anticipated.
If you embargo several towns, I can only imagine how this nightmare would become even bigger for organizers. You inevitably end with a full book of exceptions needing to be considered... or with a big number of athletes, trainers etc. being excluded just because of the place they live, work or study.

In 2015 the IOF just made up the embargo rules as we went along, for instance...

One of my testrunners met the Swedish team checking out the woods in Darnaway in 2014. Our (Swedish) IOF advisor told us that was fine if they were on a public road, so that was all right then.

I met Janne Salmi, the former head coach of the Finnish team, testrunning the middle one day before, after I put the flags out. The IOF guys just gave him a map, and didn't bother telling the organisers.

The coach of one of the GB team was given the mapping contract.

Meanwhile, a former GB sprint runner was forbidden from taking part in the National Masters cross country championship in Forres, and I was told I couldn't use any elite or junior squad athletes as testrunners, which rather cuts down the options even in a Div. 1 country like GBR.

I'm not alleging that any actual unfair advantage was gained, but for sure it was completely opaque to the planning team what was and wasn't allowed...

@blair - road closures would have to be advertised in advance (something else you don't have to do for a forest WOC).
Nothing special about forests, we closed the road through the Darnaway relay area. It meant the teams had all figured out which day was which side, and worldofo were even able to write their preview based on this unpublished information.

God those bloody Finns again. They get into everything.

In fairness to Janne, he has no formal role these days with the Finnish team or athletes, and I don't expect that he passes on restricted information he gets in his IOF role (like me, he's a member of the Foot O Commission) to Finns any more than I do to Australians.

Janne did TV commentary for YLE, he told on TV he ran course(s) before the race - apparently not just middle. His commentary was very very good, he could explain well what it is like out there that are the challenges and why, indicate right and wrong exit directions, in relay he could tell they they are showing picture from wrong control (waiting for runners at wrong TV control) and so on. His commentary is always excellent but here it really made difference since TV production with poor GPS tracking wasn't all that perfect really so there was plenty of room for the commentator to save the day.

As far as I know Janne has been living in Switzerland and ahs been coaching at least one Swiss athelte running at WOC. There may have be fairness issues at 2015 WOC but Janne running courses in advance to perfect his TV commentary hardly wasn't one of those.

Well, it could become a new frontier. Let's hope that nobody from athletes know who the test runners are because there is no rule (Danes know that IOF will be always one or two steps behind) to use them in a secret way. I really feel the same way as @gordhun. Only rules will not be enough regardless what the rules are.

Make it like AR and don't tell anyone where the course is until the day before.

@blair @jagge
To be clear, I have no criticism of Janne Salmi.
What I find extraordinary is how IOF think its OK to hand out maps to their pals without even telling the organisers. As the Portuguese found out when the WC map appeared on the internet, its the organisers who are left to take the blame.

@gordhun The GB team is just as thorough in its sprint preparation. Unfortunately for us, the Danes seem to be better at the orienteering part.