Discussion: JWOC 2016 Sprint thread

JWOC started today with the opening ceremony.
Photos from Dave Yee. (Note Emily Kemp on the big screen!!)

Start lists have been posted for tomorrow's Sprint race in Scuol, Switzerland. Join me here as we watch live starting at 9am Swiss time (3am Boston time).

Link to find out more about the US team
This year's blog

Online spectating should be good again this year. Here is link to JWOC Live pages.
Race times, Switzerland time zone:

• Sunday July 10, 9:00-12:30, Sprint (live ticker, results, GPS and TV; startlists will publish at 19:00 CET on July 9)
  
• Monday July 11, 9:00-16:30, Long
  
• Wednesday July 13, 10:00-12:30, Middle Qual
  
• Thursday July 14, 9:00-10:00, Middle B Final
  
• Thursday July 14, 10:00-13:30, Middle A Finals
  
• Friday July 15, 10:30-13:15, Relays
  

USA and Canada starters:

Start Time	Name	Country
09:01	Michael Laraia	USA
09:05	Michael Svoboda	CAN
09:12	Robert Graham	CAN
09:26	Emma Sherwood	CAN
09:37	Julia Doubson	USA
09:46	Austin Fowler	USA
09:53	Amanda Johansson	USA
09:56	Christian Michelsen	CAN
10:01	Pia Blake	CAN
10:12	Emma Waddington	CAN
10:16	Jan Erik Naess	CAN
10:20	Evalin Brautigam	USA
10:33	Tyra Christopherson	USA
10:43	Martin Heir	USA
10:53	Thomas Laraia	USA
11:03	Caelan Pangman Mclean	CAN
11:03	Nicole Whitmore	CAN
11:11	Anton Salmenkyla	USA
11:25	Aasne Skram Troemborg	USA
11:37	Leif Blake	CAN
11:43	Peter Zakrevski	USA

Thanks, Barb! I won't be up at 3:00 am to watch, but will check results later in the day. Hope everyone runs well and enjoys sprinting in Scuol!

Oh boy! It has started

Looks like Michael had a good run. He's in line to take eleventh.

Make that ninth. A couple of runners must have made mistakes.

I guess they still had some fast runners to go.

Julia started out well.

The announcer called out Julia as she finished, currently in third.

And a great start for Emma Waddington too! Woo hoo!

Yea Emma

Any idea why a place isn't displayed for Michael S?

Looks like solid races by Emma and Julia both already in to the finish. Lots of Runners still to go, but looking good so far.

Go fenry - 6th place!

The courses look challenging and fun.

Fletch + 1 - podium finish justifies hijack of US/Can thread! Brilliant run by Fenry (or is he Janfan?) bodes well for WOC.

So while I am very impressed with all the athletes today, I finally got to take a look at the courses - unlike Misha I can't say I'm very impressed! A lot of time spent in contrived legs around fake fences on parks, when the town itself had way more in the way of interesting route choice opportunities. I suppose this was for the spectators sake, but it was very unclear who was at which point in their race unless you kept a close eye on both the start list and the common control, so I'm not sure it really worked. I'd have liked to see something more interesting.

Fair enough, Becky. Why did each course have two start triangles? That does seem confusing for someone like me, who is five orders of magnitude farther away from the action.

The course was on two sides of paper- so the second start triangle was the start of the second part of the course, on the second side of the paper.

I guess the comments from Becky relates to how difficult it was to follow the race on-site? I think the live Internet was probably easier since they picked the best runners to show.
Courses looked OK - even the fenced-in part that made for some extra challenges - but I suppose they could have been just as good with only what the town had to offer in terms of streets and alleys - in general I´m not a great fan of all these artificial fences.

Leif, are you saying that the fences in the finish area were put up just for this event? I can see now that this is what Becky was talking about when she was talking about contrived legs around fake fences.

Yeah! When we left the fields after the opening ceremony yesterday, there were no fences! Today there were these crappy orange construction fences in there, for added 'challenge.' I think the challenge was likely stronger with what the town already had.

How do you feel about urban sprint as a discipline in general? Specifically, do you feel that it benefits orienteering overall? It seems that it has potential to attract participants who might start out as spectators. At the same time, it seems that the compromises that are made in course setting in order to attract spectators might not be beneficial for the orienteers who run the courses.

Sprint photos by Dave Yee.

Way to go, Juniors! Great start to JWOC.

Misha - love them in general!

My sprint photos. Some US and Canadian runners included (mostly Finnish).

Wendy took some photos today of thug, Irish and USA runners. Follow the link below to access the photos. https://www.flickr.com/photos/wendles56/albums/721...

@barb: Are Dave's photos also posted on a dedicated photo site like Smugmug. For viewing large numbers of pics, Facebook leaves a lot to be desired...

Don't know.

Dave's sprint photos also available at: https://bidwbb.smugmug.com/2016-Journal/07-July/20...

Thanks, Dave!

Thanks to everyone who posted photos! (and yes, smugmug does work better than facebook for photo sharing).

Love the urban sprint format in general. But I agree, I also detest the contrived fences except perhaps to block single gates or passages where the direct route would be too simple. Course Setters should make the most of the existing terrain. If you want contrived, grow corn and cut a corn maze!

I thought part of the purpose of the fences was to add to the terrain since anyone preparing seriously will have made their own map from Google street view and considered many, many of the leg options.

That's true, but all the fences do is make it a right or left instant route choice decision, and if one way is even only 10m shorter that could make a 1-2 second difference which could be significant. No-one can be expected to pick the difference between two routes of 400m and 420m, so in my view the placing of the fences could breach the fairness rule. And that's not including whether they are actually placed in the mapped positions on the day.

As a spectator and also having running the women's course afterwards I felt that that the fences worked well. it made for a great route choice leg and then a critical set of legs at the end of the course that allowed for great drone coverage. several participants mentioned it surprised them. speaking of participants how about a discussion on them! Repeat gold for Simone A. and she still has two more years as a junior! Swiss men's domination. Meghan Carter Davies (GBR) just off the podium. 39 countries! the real stories are the athletes (their photos, their stories, their inspiration and motivation). Makes for better AP reading that the "this is really getting old" (but kinda expected) technical ranting.

Agree with the drone coverage - and the fences added to that bit - so yes, in that respect they were a positive touch to the courses.

A note from one of the course setters.

We didn't add the fences for the fun of it but to improve the courses. It was mainly for two reasons, one was rhat it added some difficulty to the part after the arena passage. Without it, it would have been blunt running through the open park. Due to distance and climb we could not go a second time to the "interesting" old part.

Second, the long route would have been very obvious and much faster. Also here we think it added to make the course more interesting.

At no point we wanted to have it just for the spectators.

By the way, we set an identical fence on the model map close to one of the controlls crossing a trail.