Discussion: Relay results?

I’d love to know if I punched all correctly

I'd love to know who won each of the categories....

Peteris, that may have to wait. We hope it will appear one day, when data is sorted in the universe. For all practical purposes, it was a fun relay, and I assume you punched all right controls in right order. if you used a gps watch, you may check it yourself, just trace your track and compare it to your map.

I think I was moving too fast: per GPS I have crossed several buildings diagonally.

I think a GPS trace from a sprint (which is 100% reliable) and admitting on a public forum that you ran through buildings is all that's needed to have you officially DQed.

Except when certain building had pass-through corridors...

By the end of my sprint the GPS track placed me several meters to the north of where I actually was.

Lying on a GPS trace is also a DQ worthy event.

My 1st sprint control was in one of those pass-through corridors... which was an effective way of getting people quickly adjusted to looking at them as legal-to-use passages.

Relay results are being worked on, I'm told. May be out tomorrow.

What was the deal with the uncrossable fence that evidently had a hole in it right by the control? I didn't notice the hole but heard it from others. I did see someone running straight towards me from the wrong side of the fence when I was at the control. Did people really reach through the hole and thus cross the fence twice?

Which control was that, Mitch? Relay or Sprint?

Relay, the fenced field SW of the stadium. I was outside the fence almost to the flag when I saw the open gate in the mapped-as-uncrossable fence.

Yes, lots of people used the unmapped, open gate, including the mapper.

I chose the legit, northern route to get to that control (#19 I think), but I remember not being sure if my vision was deceiving me or if there was actually an unmapped gate. Even so, I really can't complain at all about the map; Rex and Bob Cooley did an amazing job!

Problems like this have plagued us before, e.g., at an event in Berkeley, people reached through an uncrossable fence to punch a control. Furthermore, that same uncrossable fence turned out to have a gate in it that was openable from the inside, and some people got to the control legitimately but then exited illegally by opening that gate and going through. At first I thought it was just people who don't know the rules, but then I learned that a number of people who do know the rules (as in the current case, the mapper) did it, and they said that in the heat of the race they just acted instinctively. So, anyone have suggestions about how to deal with these things? (Oops, I'm hijacking this thread.) We clearly don't have the person power to have marshalls everywhere, so that can't be the answer.

If you don't have the people-power how about some streamer tape? Most people will respect streamer tape (or do a double-check of the map when they see it), even in the heat of the race. A lot of the sprints I ran in Norway made great use of streamer tape to mark possibly ambiguous OOB areas (making them unambiguous). The idea isn't to DQ people, it's to make sure everyone runs the same race, and that will work for most people.

I think the problem in this case is that the organizers were not aware that the gate was even there. Hard to solve a problem if you don't know it exists. Obviously, more vetting could have helped, but sometimes you just get unlucky. (See WMOC 2019 sprint and the closed gate debacle.)

Right, Boris, that is the situation that is tough to handle, and I'm sure that was the case Sunday, as it was for the Berkeley meet I described. At Berkeley, the gate was closed during vetting, and it didn't occur to the vetter to see if it could be opened. It was closed during the meet, but clearly it occurred to some competitors to try it.

For an important event I don't think there is an answer other than just having more people focused on the details in the hours and days leading up to the event. There should be people assigned to go out and check and streamer walls, gates, openings, oob areas, etc. before the first start. A lot of people. Putting on a fair event in an urban setting can be difficult.

For a fun relay event with limited volunteer power, maybe it's just not a big deal? I didn't see the opening until I got to the control (from the outside), and while it made me double-check the map to see if I had missed a really obvious route, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the idea that some people had faster splits because they saw the opening and went for it.

This was not a championship event. Who made the mistake? The mapper, course setter, the vetter. My team should be DQed, I went through the open gate that was visible right next to the control. Did I see the solid line, yes, did I see others in front of me yes. Let’s just make time for the bowling relays next year.

Yeah, urban sprints can be hard.

For most of the ones I've produced, I've been both the mapper and course designer, so I'm pretty aware of potential trouble spots.

As far as gates go, at one location, there was an unlocked gate on a campus that was sometimes open and sometimes closed when I was there during mapping and course scouting. On event day, I brought a lock and locked it such that it was open and couldn't be closed.

At another location, there were four gates that were always open and unlocked during all of my visits, but I was always nervous about them. On event day, I re-checked them all and two of them were locked. So the event staff got out some sharpies and we "fixed" the maps.

There was event where we went to the trouble of taping off a lot of olive green areas and a few uncrossable walls. But there was one uncrossable wall that we didn't tape off and a bunch of kids (and a few adults) who jumped down. Many of them didn't know the rules, but we had to DQ them all. With heat starts, it was pretty easy to figure out who did it, and plus once we started having open discussions about it, others 'fessed up. Still, I felt terrible about the whole thing. I tried to be proactive with tape and rule education, but you can only do so much.

So yeah, urban sprints can be hard.