Discussion: WOC 2022

WorldofO all you need to know!

http://news.worldofo.com/2022/06/24/woc-2022-all-y...

It seems like every year the intensity of interest in WOC on AP decreases. Why is that? You’d hardly know it was going on, and it’s going to be brilliant.

Its already brilliant. Great TV coverage. No down time.

Big silver medal for GB. I'm so happy to see that and especially pleased to see Charlotte start off with such a great first leg as she was a McMaster student back in 2013 (exchange).

Also more Swedish dominance and Tove just has another gear that no other women have.

Finally, a bit of controversy today too to keep those that are here on AP for that kind of stuff. ;-)

it was awesome to see how important route choice was on some of the long legs. I really liked the courses and what a great arena!

I didn't answer your question but that is for another time.

I did notice there was very little interest in WOC this year if AP is anything to go by. Many of the non-Euro countries DQed/MP in the relay (including Aus and Canada, how sad). I stayed up very late only to have Aus tick over to DQ well after our last leg runner finished.

NZ in the same boat tRicky. But, if you're not on the physical and mental limit, are you going fast enough for this discipline? Plenty of interest over here, j-man.

Yeah I wasn't going to mention NZ ;-)

Is it the case that if your first or second leg runner MPs, your later runners don't get to go out? Neither NZ or Canada had splits from 3rd or 4th leg runners (nor Japan and Slovakia from 4th leg after their 2nd leg mishaps). Seems like a long way to go for nothing if you're a last leg runner and you don't get to go out (and you're not in any other events).

There aren't any splits, but I believe I saw photos of the third and fourth Canadian legs running, so perhaps it was just that the splits aren't shown but they were allowed to run?

Tim Robertson has his race on Strava

teams continue (I don't know if later leg runners even know the team's been DQ'd until after it's all over) but are effectively voided from the results from the first mp onwards. So for example the NZ team continued on, stayed close enough to the lead to keep just appearing on the TV coverage but I knew something was up when they were consistently not getting a split on the camera controls. Going by the GPS tracking on the last leg, would have been about 11th or 12th, so I'm choosing to be more excited about the potential for next time with a couple of years' more experience in the tank than sad about the final outcome.

I'm choosing to be more excited about next time with a couple of DAYS more experience in the tank. Penelope might, but shouldnt, feel bad. First WOC.

Sorry I didn't mean splits, I meant radios. Thought Canada was in trouble when they'd missed a radio although the Colombian last leg runner had no radios registered - perhaps she was out so long they turned them all off.

Yeah the individual races will be good with Aston making up time on the leaders in the relay. Nea had a slow start but made up places through her run.

Agree. Great arena, venue, and awesome for GB. What a complete performance… I may be in the minority, but I love this format!

Ok, here’s my obligatory annoying technical question… what are the yellow circles outlined in black (and in one case overlapping) around #105? I’m just not up to date on the standards these days…

Thought bubbles.

Seriously though, small grassed areas in amongst the paving.

I think they are nothing more than circles of grass, with an edge line. The overlapping circle could be the special symbol mentioned in the border of the map - outdoor sports facility/play equipment.

Thanks!

I saw Emily Kemp finishing so at least they all got to run.

The rule is that once a team has accepted its disqualification then no further runners are permitted to start, but in practice things happen too quickly in a sprint relay for this to come into play.

Emily's not listed with a result for Canada though. All other countries had all their runners out (other than Ireland). Four MPs and two DQs.

Emily 100% ran. I haven’t heard of anyone being stopped from their run. So yes everything too fast really. But that’s ok in my mind, it’s exciting!. I think we should all get to finish even if the result is a DQ.

And yea GO GB!!!

Not disagreeing, just saying she's not listed in the Eventor results. Oddly Hong Kong and Colombia are both listed below Moldova, which had the longest time out there by far.

I was so excited I got up at 3.15am, a day early.

The separation of Sprint/Forest is a good thing and so is having sprint format overall. A diverse range of skills are required, specialists can excel but as in other sports eg cricket, the best of the best will excel in all forms.

Penny Salmon has a bright future, 11th/12th or so through leg one, barely 18 years old, still in her last year of school. Daughter child tells me she is off to Harvard on an athletics scholarship.

I'm pretty sure that even if they're going to be or are already DQ'd (overtime, mp, etc) everyone still gets to run. Last year for the US team I still got to run even though I was by far the last starter and it was already obvious we'd be overtime (I think I'd have to finish in 5-10 minutes for us to not be overtime which was faster than the winning times).

I thought the commentary team and overall IOF broadcast was excellent. They seemed well prepared and had had time to review the courses beforehand. I also enjoyed the sound of the deep breathing of the chasing camera crew. You could feel the oxygen debt building and sense the runners blurring minds!

I didn't see one, but maybe Hong Kong and Colombia were in a mass start? (the last Colombian runner finished implausibly soon after the third otherwise). Teams in a mass start are placed after those who weren't.

You probably wouldn't notice a mass start of two people but yes that makes sense. Both of those teams had their third runners through after the one hour mark. Both fourth leg runners have times (whether they're correct or not is up for debate) but neither has a 'time behind the leader'. Moldova third runner came in before the hour but their fourth leg runner took over 40 minutes so their overall time looks clearly last.

Used to be (for forest relays, at least), that later runners were not allowed to go out if earlier runners had been disqualified, due to some misguided notion that a runner from a disqualified team could/would be effectively "interfering" with the remaining teams. I'm glad to see that the officials have come to their senses on that matter, since at the very least you have the possibility that the disqualified team may submit a protest and get the earlier runner reinstated, and then where would you be? (I think something along those lines actually happened to the team from USA once, but the details escape me.)

The Hong Kong/Colombia times are consistent with a mass start at 56 minutes. (The available time window for the race would have been quite tight because the road closures were only supposed to be in place until 7pm, 90 minutes after the start). The total times appear to have been calculated incorrectly though? (have queried this with the SEA, so hopefully it will be fixed).

I can confirm that Colombia (and probably Hong Kong) went off in a very mini fourth-leg mass start.

The Colombia team were a joy to watch - so obviously having fun and delighted to be there. We were sitting in the stands next to a bunch of 'IOF Clinic' athletes (Argentina, Serbia, Croatia, the non-running Colombians) and their enthusiastic cheering whenever a Colombian athlete came through the arena was infectious.

Sitting on our other side were the non-running members of the Swedish squad, which also made for an entertaining atmosphere. They all went very quiet when Kris overtook Gustav on the third-leg run-in, but were back on their feet by the end.

Later runners aren't allowed to start if earlier runners are accepted as DQed. But, if you protest your DQ, your team can keep running. So, if you ever mp on first leg at WOC, you need to deny it so your teammates get a run.
When I saw Tim Robertson, NZ were running leg 3 alongside SUI.

You don't need to protest, you just need not to "accept". (Under the old wording of the rule you got teams putting in highly speculative protests just so they could keep running, which wasted a lot of jury time).

Did anybody have problems with live tracking? I tried a couple of times but nothing was available but maybe that was just me.

Aside. I dont want to appear greedy because tracking at all is great, but the standard GPS technology seems to be stuck at the 10-15m level, and worse in urban canyons. (Waiver - I only watched the replays, at 2X speed.) Around here we have been promised an augmentation service which seems to be like the North American WAAS, and I would have thought maybe similar services exist in Europe. But you need a flexible mind to guess where the dots REALLY are.

I never got the gps tracking to work.

I couldn't get it on my phone (needed to install the app) but I can get it on my laptop so I only watched the replay afterwards (I was in bed at the time). Had to make an assumption where the Aus runner went OOB given the inaccuracy of GPS in urban areas, presume on the way from 14-15.

I do not have the Trac Trac app on my phone so watched the GPS later on PC. But I find https://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/ so much easier to use than TracTrac. But the accuracy was very poor so hard to know where the runners actually went. So glad the event was on late so I had not bothered to pay anything.

Neither the GPS nor the live results link from the main Sprint Relay page were correct when I was watching live (maybe it was different if you'd paid - I didn't bother as I was watching a bike race at the same time). I managed to find both by going via the main TracTrac and Liveresultat pages respectively.

The live GPS was adequate to give a general picture of how the race panned out so long as you assumed people weren't actually running through buildings half the time. For some reason I found the map quite hard to read on screen with the mapping style looking a lot more cluttered than I'd normally expect. Maybe this was justified by the terrain, but it looked as if the mappers had prioritised absolute accuracy over legibility.

As for TracTrac, it's still easily the worst piece of interface design I've encountered in years...

I was going to say refreshing the live event home page seems to fix links to GPS, live results etc once they're underway, but after several refreshes the 'live' KO qualification results are actually completed results from what I think is last month's test races. Hopefully will change by the time the first finishers are in. Which should be in only 5 minutes or so...

...fixed in the time it took to type that :-)

There's more discussion about tracker accuracy on the FB group "Orienteering Mappers Int". Sounds like some knowledgeable contributors, but no obvious answers.

So close, Penelope! Tim is this taking brinkmanship a bit far? Joe save something for the final:-))

24 countries to be represented in the knock-outs. Tim, Joseph (NZ), Aston (AUS) and Emma (CAN) flying the flag for the-world-beyond-Europe.

Joey Hadorn and Lucas Basset probably the biggest names to miss the cut-off. Apart from Karolin Ohlsson being dq'd, no similar shocks in the women's field although when you're cutting those fields down to 36 there's always going to be some very capable runners miss out. (From the NZ perspective, while I'd normally never wish ill on a Finn, if only one of them had been a second or two slower - our 'secret weapon' in this event stays secret a little bit longer)

"TV" broadcast of the 1/4 finals will apparently be live and free to view (4pm CET).
Linked from:
https://orienteering.sport/event/world-orienteerin...

@gruver: another 10m of finish chute and Penelope would have been in, I reckon

So many tough heats in the quarter finals.
Men’s heat 5 looks particularly interesting.

Congratulations to Emma!!!

Do two runners qualify from each QF? I haven't seen this info anywhere.

Edit: looks like three from each QF go to the SF.
https://orienteering.sport/woc-knock-out-sprint-fo...

there from each QF to SF. Two from each SF to F

Men’s heat 5 looks particularly interesting.

I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere.

"A Brit, an Aussie and a Kiwi walk up to a QF start line..."

.. and they mutually agree to knock out the nordic racers.

Edit: i hope

Unbelievable they did it! what a race

Impressive running from the Commonwealth!

Yeah I though Tim and Ralph were out of it when they took the other route to everyone else but they caught back up.

Funny just how many have run into the dead end after #2.

Let's go Adventure Girl!

:-(

It's crazy just watching the mindsets at work. CP 4-5 everyone follows everyone even if they're going a really stupid way. CP 6-7 on the other hand is like a starburst.

I think Tim is trying to give everyone back home a nervous breakdown... oh well, as long as he keeps pulling through right at the end, we'll forgive him. Great work on the commonwealth blocking maneuver at the end of that q'final, no way were the nordics getting past them on the line :-D

This has been wildly entertaining so far. Much more so than I had expected, given the lack of forking.

That was really exciting. Would love to see more (one?) of these races in North America. Heck more of any form of sprint (except the NA fixation on forest sprint) would be good to see in NA. Looking forward to the WOC KO SF and F

Great day for Emma!

Would love to see more (one?) of these races in North America

My kiddo will start kindergarten in 2023, so maybe I'll do another one in 2024?

North America should be careful. These races look too fun.

Where can you have an urban sprint like these in North America, other than college campuses? Most places have a straightforward grid alignment, and then you have to close off auto traffic. Maybe a big park like Golden Gate or Stanley Park.
Cal-O-Fest will have a sprint in Golden Gate Park and one in the Presidio of San Francisco next year before the NAOC. Not entirely urban, though.

Eef makes the final!

Where can you have an urban sprint like these in North America
Talk to someone from GVOC - they seem to have no problem finding good urban areas year in, year out for their Sprint Camp

Wow, that last women's semi final - hopefully the finals are just as exciting!

No forking and yet execution and route choice still wins the race. So exciting.

Yes. Congrats to the course setters!

Good sprint terrain in North America is definitely part of the problem, but with good, creative course setting you can definitely set good urban sprints even in somewhat mediocre terrain.

Access to urban sprint terrain is a bigger issue than the terrain existing. One of the major reasons for no GVOC sprint camp the past several years is they can't get permits for the major urban spaces (e.g. the UBC campus). Permitting for urban spaces is a complete and utter nightmare in the COVID world. My club (Sage - next door to GVOC) has not successfully gotten an urban event permit since the pandemic started, but I think by next year we should be able to start getting those permits again.

Very fun WOC races to watch, and exciting to have a new country on the Women's podium! Overall mapping was also much better than the sprint relay.

I slept through the semis (have a flight in the morning) but how did Tim, Ralph and Aston end up running against each other again?

Ralph and Tim both chose the quarter-final that Aston was in (the fastest qualifiers get first pick).

@tRicky the quarter-finals were bracketed into the semi-finals, so that the three runners who qualified from any given quarter-final were guaranteed to be running against one another again in the semi-finals, together with the three runners who had qualified from the other quarter-final in the same bracket.

It makes the runner's choice of quarter-final even more tactical - you have to consider not just who you fancy running against in the quarter-final, but also who may be awaiting you in the semis.

Doesn't sound like an advantage to have the fastest qualifying time. You essentially get to select an empty QF.

The first pick actually goes to the second-fastest qualifiers - the fastest qualifiers can then choose either an empty heat or to run against a number 2 qualifier. Aston did the latter, which was interesting (conversely no-one nominated heat 6 until, I think, pick 16).

So, "runner's choice" didn't actually mean choosing between controls A, B, C on the course at all?

No, they didn't use that as an option in any round.

The mean doubled and tripled up on the heats in heat selection to a much greater extent that I anticipated. The the first six women on the other hand each chose an empty heat.

For the men it is about recovery time between the finals.

That doesn't explain why heat 5, which had the second-least amount of recovery time, was the one which (mostly) filled quickly.

CW collusion! ;-) - For some the recovery time may be the decisive factor, for others to avoid favorits, perhaps?

orienteers can run on almost any surface (rock, mud, screw, swamp, etc) but that damn KO sprint carpet not so much

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CfY39iSDs31/?igshid...

With recovery time, some might prefer it to be shorter to reduce the chances of muscles becoming tighter.

Tim, Joe and Tommy (NZ) and Aston (Aus) qualify for the men's final. The defending world champion does not.

Penelope continues her relaxed warm-up for her JWOC debut by coming 2nd in a heat with names like Roos, Hagstrom and van Dongen, joined by Laura (both NZ) and Kotomi Ibe (when did we last see a Japanese woman qualify?). For a while it looked like Evalin and/or Emma were going to give the North Americans someone to cheer for but a few too many fast runners late in their heat. If you're looking for someone to support in their absence, plenty of kiwis to choose from ;-)

Great to see so many non Europeans in the finals.
Vegard the Scanadian (tied with Key in heat A) is through too

Vegard the Scanadian (tied with Key in heat A) is through too
Was just coming back to apologise for missing him. We love Canada, too! (the state-siders can still cheer for the kiwis though)

The link at the top of this page doesn't seem to show start lists, results or much of anything really.

Yes I meant the link in the page above that links to the page you've just linked to (the links in that page are non-existent).

I had to click the little refresh icon in the results section to get the links to appear the first time.

Me too.

Yeah it works now, thanks. The refresh on the webpage didn't do that! I actually think I refreshed it this way the other day but forgot that was an option - the perils of jetlag.

Solid racing from Team USA all around, with particularly good performances from Evalin and Joe!

And really impressive qualifying by Team NZ!

I seem to recall a Southern Hemisphere junior woman making a bit of a splash the last time a WOC sprint was held in this part of the world. Would be quite something if that bit of history repeats itself...#nopressure

We'll see a lot of orienteers making a splash in the arena passage

I wondered about that. Mandatory water crossing.

Yeah, Aston on the podium (unofficially)! Also that British guy.

Whoops, now it's the other British guy.

Fabulous day for the British women! So fun to watch. Onwards to Edinburgh 2024 now!

Will the race videos be available for free at some stage?

Was that the hardest sprint course we've ever seen in international orienteering?

Congratulations to the organizers for an exceptionally well run event, based on the reports I've read, in settings that look very difficult to administer.

Yes, congratulations to the organizers, and to the live stream coverage. Exciting races broadcasted very well.

Nice job, USA. Woo-hoo, go team!

Re hardest course, if you include WMOC qualifiers as international, I think New Zealand can stake a claim.

TIL + 1 - that was a real doozy! Routegadget.

Unfortunately I never got to upload my route to RG, but here's my AP log. Tried saving the gps from this log entry, but it seems to be the wrong scale when I try to draw it in RG

Are those purple areas the result of artificial barriers? Would have been a pretty new idea at the time.

No I think construction sites. And note absence of multi-level puzzles. Perhaps enough without them. Wasn't there a controversial tunnel situation in the final?

Simmo you could always click your route in, as I did.

Artificial barriers tend to have a purple line with purple cross hatch behind rather than showing an actual uncrossable fence (and yes I just discovered this only recently). There was some confusion in the MSW with one of the course controllers being a MTBO rider but having being told about the purple barrier in sprints (which were used in her event) indicating an impassable route. In MTBO it just means you might have to get off.

Yes, the tunnel did for me in the final, didn't see the steps leading out of it. Tell me how to 'click' my route in. First I tried looking for my original gpx file, but two computers later it's gone. Then I tried saving the file from my AP log, but when I uploaded it to my course (13) in Routegadget it was the wrong scale.

At the time of WMOC I was on a 5-week trip to NZ and didn't have any means to download from my watch. I think when I got home I posted some but not all to RG.

It would be interesting to see that tunnel mapped to the new specification. I lost time there, but was in good company including the convener of the following EA workshop.

@canadian. Edinburgh has its difficult multilevel moments too...
https://www.soa.routegadget.co.uk/rg2/#41&cour...

It was a warm-up for a Park World Tour and WRE, and there may have been some advantage in local knowledge. Do keep going down the results list, also for the women: world champions aren't usually twice the winners time.

You can have fun remapping to modern standards. Roll on 2024!