Discussion: Team USA results, Sprint Qualification in Peschici

Of the 30 athletes registered as USA and who started (there were others... Takashi running as JPN... didn't attempt to track all Americans), eight made it through to the A Finals: Wyatt Riley in M45, Sergey Velichko and Tom Hollowell in M60, Dennis Wildfogel in M75, Marie-Josée Parayre in W45, Angelica Riley in W50, Pavlina Brautigam in W60, and Sharon Crawford in W75.

I personally thought the event was skating on the edge of being a minor wreck, but it managed to stay on the better side of said edge. At the start there were two CP description corrections posted (what if your language is not English?) My 9th (? don't have my map yet) checkpoint was being carried by someone to the correct destination and about two meters from reaching it when I punched it. (When I first saw it, it was about 10 m away.) Multiple locations had to be taped off during the course of the event, apparently due to landowner complaints. Stephanie went out and videotaped a small train of runners exiting a taped-off area; don't know if any were disqualified. Likely not. Edges between inbounds and out-of-bounds were often quite unclear in the terrain; I faced an inbounds where one had to hop on tops of concrete pillars, or else slide down a sketchy slope strewn with broken concrete with a minor cliff at its bottom. Next to it were perfectly good stairs, which unfortunately terminated into a locked gate; they were out-of-bounds and unmapped.

Police were everywhere screaming at drivers... hopefully everyone made it through safely.

that sounds like a very chaotiic race... good job to all those that made it to the A finals!

Most of the chaos seemed to have become unchaotic by the time I ran, or maybe our course just didn't go to the problematic areas.

Italian drivers vs 3000 runners was an interesting battle

FWIW, there appear to be no official results. There were liveresultat dot se, but you "just had to know" from the grapevine, there wasn't any official word about them. Physically onsite there were two medium-size monitors for 2000 people, a classic Covid-Central setup. The scrolling kept freezing and the accompanying Windows error messages were in Hungarian.

What I presume to be official results are on IOF Eventor.

yes, just now. "You Just Have To Know ©"

The worst is the 'WMOC Tour' competition, for people under 35. This is really sub standard.

It was equally bad, if not worse, at the 2022 WOC; mind it that WOC-Tourers do really pay a good chunk of the WOC bills, unlike WMOC-Tourers who are for practical purposes pests. @Graeme

To be clear, I didn't go out intending to video people out of bounds. I was just taking some photos and videos after my run, and when I found myself back at the area where I had a lot of trouble with the map, I discovered they had taped off the out of bounds area and put up a cone. I thought to myself how much clearer it would have been if the tape had been up when I got there, so then I was surprised to find there were still a lot of runners going under the tape into the out of bounds area. They weren't intentionally going out of bounds. It didn't serve them any purpose. It was out of their way. They were just confused by the map, and the primary reason for that is because there was a building there mapped as olive green rather than gray. I understand from Ben that the roof of the building was a terrace, and so presumably the point of mapping it in olive green was to indicate that one could not go onto the roof. From the ground, however, where we were all so confused, it meant it was very difficult to reconcile the map to the ground. I've never seen a single building mapped olive green like that. I would think mapping it gray with pink striping to indicate the rooftop terrace was out of bounds perhaps would make it clearer. The confusion for me was increased because the wide open gate that later was taped off was mapped as a thick black line, so I was expecting to see a wall or some such. That wasn't the case for runners who got there after the tape was put up, but it still was a confusing area.

I mostly just want to know how we're supposed to get to the arena tomorrow. The "embargo" map doesn't show what is out of bounds. It only shows how to get from the parking lot to the arena. All well and good if you plan to helicopter into the parking lot, but if you're staying in Vieste (as I imagine most everyone is), how do you know what route you should take to the parking lot? Or are you just supposed to be there by 7 a.m., when the embargo starts?? LOL.

The embargo map shows the embargo area in detail if you enlarge it enough. I'm slightly annoyed that I'm staying 20 metres inside it so will have to clear out by 7.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong thing. I asked if there was an embargo map and what they sent me is the map that shows the walk from the parking lot to the arena. Is it in the bulletin? *edit: I located it on the website - thanks!

There's no embargo map in the bulletin but there's a link to where it is - https://www.wmocitaly.eu/embargo/

Haven't seen a start list for tomorrow yet but I expect that IOF Eventor will be the place to find it. From past experience these often appear quite late.

Is anyone interested in the excursions (Monte Sant Angelo on the 12th and Daunia Doc wine route on the 15th)? We're on a list for both, but they advised there have to be 40 people signed up for the tours to go. They both sound amazing: https://www.wmocitaly.eu/2022/07/06/take-part-in-t...

I thought I was in the embargo area, but on closer examination I'm just out of it.
I'm interested in the Monte Sant'Angelo excursion. Daunia is a little far. I would have to skip the Forest Model thought.
Is anyone going to the banquet Thursday night? I signed up for it. 50 euros is a little steep but you can spend that on a nice dinner in Vieste.

Having been to a couple of races previously organised by the same crew, I am not in the slightest surprised that it is all pretty “improvised”. They generally do manage to stay just on the edge of acceptable, but this is a different scale to what they’re used to. Fingers crossed for the rest of the week!

Start list for the Sprint Final is up.
https://eventor.orienteering.org/Events/StartList?...

Yes, missing the Forest Model is a downside, for sure. I'm not really competitive anyway, so I figure I'll see the forest when I see it. . . and the tour sounds one-of-a-kind. The banquet isn't on our agenda. Ben signed us up and he never buys any of the "extras."

Are there any course maps anywhere please? Thanks.

Did anyone get their map back?

was anyone able to find tour results?

Is there an easy way to tell how many people qualify from each class?

one half of entrants (as of some deadline about 2 week prior) rounded up, or 80 (81 if 3 heats), whichever is less. There's a bit more nuance but that's the simple part. Relegation is the hard part, not sure even a Ph.D. helps

Isn't it 80 qualify if over 160 entries, for under that number, 50% rounded up

Looks to me like if the field size was <160 then half the people qualified. If it was >160 then there are ~80 in A, ~80 in B and the rest in C.

I started fairly early (before 10am) and thought it was all fine! The live results link worked from the start and had been posted in advance (sorry, can’t remember which comms from the organisers it was in). The ‘sketchy’ inbounds slope was indeed pretty rough but was mapped as steep semi open with rocky pits. And the map reclaim opened after last start just as promised in the bulletin, with brand new copies of the maps. They also made all the boxes of used maps available for people to grab from if they wanted.
Having to be out of the sprint embargo area first thing in the morning if staying there is no different from other WMOCs, it was the same in Riga in 2018.

Yes it would have been helpful for people to know an approx Final start time early, by publishing in advance the number to make each A final, and the approx start band for each A/B/C final, but actually the start times for the final were published in pretty good time, early evening.

I thought it was a really fun race, I can believe in an area like that (in particular) there were on the day issues today resolve re out of bounds and unhappy locals, but in general I would say rather than criticism, congrats are due to the organisers on pulling it off. And good luck to them for today and staging another great race for us all for the Final!

I and most everyone I talked to thought this was a superb and historic race. The organization was excellent. Maybe people who were not there should not comment on the views of a vocal few.

I would echo Jon X. I started later (about 1130) and everything ran smoothly from my perspective. I really enjoyed it and I'm not usually a fan of Sprint races.

My only criticism is the lack of links from the website to results and start lists. Surely easily resolvable?

They have put in some links on the website. Still no link to liveresultat.

I have to admit my impression was strongly affected by someone carrying my CP to its location while folks followed him trying to punch. Have never seen that before at WMOCs. This was oh at about 9:28, give or take a couple of minutes. Haven't had CP description corrections at the start either, but that's quite understandable and better than several alternatives.