Discussion: WOC Long Qualification

Team USA is off to the start of today's Long Qualification Races. Long qualification is on the Lina Vesterskov map, which contains a lot of contour detail, a mixture of coniferous and decidous woodland, with areas of some open land, and a dense network of trails and roads. The weather today is sunny with mixed cloud cover, 63-78 F. The start times and course lengths are as follows:

Men: 10.6-10.7km, 460-490 m climb, 21-22 controls, 1:15,000 map, 2 refreshment stations, 59 min expected winning time.

31 Eric Bone USA 10:21
40 Eddie Bergeron USA 10:27
85 Clem McGrath USA 10:57

Women: 6.9-7.0 km, 375-390 m climb, 15-16 controls, 1:15,000 map, 1 refreshment station, 47 min expected winning time.
210 Sandra Zurcher USA 10:06
235 Samantha Saeger USA 10:22
270 Pavlina Brautigam USA 10:46

Best of luck today to everyone!

And the Canadian runners are:

26 Jon Torrance 10:17
65 Patrick Goeres 10:43
106 Brent Langbakk 11:11
(also 108 Nick Duca 11:11 - running for Romania)

207 Justine Scheck 10:04
236 Charlotte MacNaughton 10:22
273 Louise Oram 10:48

All in good health and looking calm, cool and collected this morning.

It'll be interesting to see if the winning time estimations will be more accurate today - pretty far off yesterday, considering a number of top runners put in essentially error-free races and still didn't approach the 25min expected winning time.

Should be far less bracken and other "variable" forest debris today, although there apparently is some new logging with new tracks that has occured since the maps were made. The climb, which seems to be especially hefty on the womens' course, will be a major factor.

Wil the pictures from the IOF show some pretty deadly woods, how much of the Middle qualifier was like that?

Well, about the first 30% was in moorland - lots of heather and bracken and uneven underfoot. That was pretty tough, and it was also the most technical section from an execution standpoint - if people made mistakes it was most often there. Starting early sucked - there were some sections where organizers had tramped or cut down bracken, but in other areas I had to break trail through chest-high ferns and that was no party.

In the second half of the course the forest was mainly open with good visibility - but there were a lot of blueberries underfoot so it wasn't quite as "clean" running as one might have hoped. The main challenge there was to make good route choices and be careful enough with the high-speed navigation, as well as launching yourself up the climbs as quickly as possible....

Here are some preliminary results. Unfortunately, no North Americans qualilfied for the long final. I think that Louise Oram (CAN) was the closest. The courses ran into a lot of hilly and dense/junky areas. Unfortunately, I do not have the winner or Canadian finish times, but the official results should be available soon.

So, partial results (from Karen's notes) are:

Men's Heat A.
15. Z. Denes
31. Clem McGrath 86:00

Men's Heat B.
15. A. Zhuravlev 71.14
27. Eddie Burgeron 82:47

Men's Heat C.
15. V. Pospisil 70:05
25. Eric Bone 78:07

Women's A.
15. Mingyue Zhu 59:07
22. Pavlina Brautigam 62:19

Women's B
15. Yoko Bamba 57:46
21. Samantha Saeger 60:54

Women's C
15. Jenny Whitehead 58:11
DSQ: Sandra Zurcher

While it didn't go so well for the US and Canadian teams today, the GB squad are having a very good world champs so far, apart from Oli with a mispunch. Jenny Whitehead 's finishing speed got her into the Women's Long final by 2 seconds to give GB a full complement of 3 runners there. In the men's Jaime S is running really well and Jon D showed he can handle the pressure of an early mistake in the toughest heat in Men's C. GB also has 3 runners in both the Middle distance finals, so if you are looking for another underdog country to cheer for go Brits.

and it seems that Oli Johnson's mispunch was an error in the SI technology and not him missing a control. He received the flash/beep but there was only a time recorded on the card, no control number. So he was DQd. And apparently they aren't allowed to interrogate the SI unit to confirm that he was there. This also happened to Heather Monro in the World Cup Final in Italy last year... so isn't a one-off problem. Using what seems to be unreliable technology in a WOC doesn't seem right to me :(

Unfortunate. I would have thought the general principle that competitors aren't penalised for things that are the fault of the organisers would have held sway here. After all, he must have punched some SI unit if it recorded the time. If it didn't also record which unit it was, it's hard to see how it's his fault.

This is pretty shocking. The SI people need to be responsible to certify the results. This isn't an IOF call---It should be the procedures as defined by SportIdent. Does IOF contract with SI for the gear, or it is owned and operated by the organizers? It seems like the former is the only reasonable way to do it for a WOC. (I know PWT contracts for SI services, and I think that's great.)

What I heard is that the control in question was the radio control, which radioed his time back to the event center when he punched. However, the rules stipulate that the time and control stamp must also be registered on the SI card, which they were not, thus the DSQ. That this sort of mess-up is possible with the SI technology seems pretty lame to me. Even with the SI-6 cards, it is pretty easy to punch so fast that the control unit doesn't beep and flash. I very much prefer SI to Emit, but I hope it can be made more robust.

I had a lesser problem than Oli today, but nonetheless one that affected my results. Going to perhaps my 7th control, I passed through an area that was surrounded by a high fence (mapped with two tick marks). The organizers had said that it would be allowed to cross all fences, unless doing so would mean entering an out-of-bounds area. It would have been better for me to have gone around the fence, but there I was inside it, so I was running along the inside toward a corner where I planned to climb out. Then, another competitor, who was standing on the other side of the fence with a clipboard-wielding event official wearing what appeared to be an olive green army uniform, told me that I mustn't cross the fence or the official would write down my bib number and have me disqualified. I stopped and said I thought this was wrong and that we had been told this would be okay, but the official--who was saying nothing but looking intently at my bib number with his pen poised on the clipboard. I said that I would run back to the gate and around but that I would complain later.

After the race, I wrote a formal complaint about this in which I described the situation and lamented that the 1.5 minutes I lost would hurt my World Ranking points from the race. The organizers responded five minutes after I submitted the complaint with a note that said it appeared that I was unfairly delayed by this apparently misguided official but that the rules make no provisions for a competitor's time to be adjusted under such circumstances. Given that there was no further reasonable remedy to be had, I accepted the apology letter and went to get some lunch. Still, it's hard to think of my time as 76:37 rather than the 78:07 that was up on the results board.

A positive note is that this run-in with the renegade official didn't cause me to get upset to distraction and blow the rest of the course. I had a pretty good run, all in all: my legs felt fairly good but not great, and I navigated pretty well and made pretty good route choices, although I've certainly had smoother and cleaner runs. I don't think I quite had the legs for a qualifying run today, but maybe a 73-ish minute run would have been possible for me with an essentially perfect technical performance.

Interesting report, Eric. Thank you.

Wow this sure sounds like a story straight out of Francis Falardeau! Are you sure the dude didn't have a rifle Eric? In Francis' stories they always did.

Yeah, but in Francis's stories, the dude with the rifle was always an American.

Wow I had to look to see who Fossil was!!! Mitch I haven't seen you or heard of you in years!!!! How the hell are you? Send me an email.
Good to see that someone still remembers the stories. WHat about the magnetic marshes huh? Hey Eric, was that fence magnetic by any chance?

I took a look at the IOF's 2004 competition rules (since I didn't see any 2006 WOC-specific rules). I was looking for a rule about doing the right thing in the interest of fairness, but I also took a look at the punching rules specific to SportIdent. They have a specific rule about punching too fast for the control to register on the e-card (the dibber/stick/brick/thingie) that says if the competitor punches too fast, then even the control (the electronic box) isn't good enough.

The problem with this is one of our OCIN e-punch team had an e-card that wouldn't flash+beep when inserted, even for a long time. The punch didn't register on the e-card, *and* the control (the SI box) registered an error code that means "punched too fast", even though it was inserted repeatedly, for extended periods of time. It did it on several controls during one event.

The error we got was ErrB. We got it 9 times in one day on 9 different controls. The SportSoftware help file says ErrA to ErrF are all "punched too fast" and are invalid. (I understand SportSoftware and SportIdent are different entities, but I'm not sure.) What really surprised me was that the 6 error codes tell exactly at what point the e-card was removed. It seemed strange to me that a competitor was able to mispunch 9 times and get exactly the same time-based error code. To me it was like rolling a die 9 times and getting a 2 (a "B") each time. Assuming equal time periods, that's (1/6)^9 = 1 chance in 10,077,696

So, I'm not so sure that I was right in my earlier comment. If IOF has accepted SI's story that the error code for "punched too fast" is always correct, then they need to reconsider that rule.

Don't assume that all time periods are equally likely. If there are six phases to the exchange of data, and five of them take 1 ms each, but the ErrB one takes 95 ms, it woudn't be surprising if ErrB was the one you always got. That said, it does sound like there's something wrong with that dipstick, such that it's getting stalled at the ErrB point or something.

(I think about this stuff a lot. I write this kind of bottom-feeding software for a living.)

Yeah, I figured in the absence of information, equal periods was reasonable. For your scenario, each ErrB is 95% likely, so the probability of 9 in a row is about 63%. But this argument is only needed if you don't trust the competitor, who is from our SI team, and has probably given the "flash and beep" speech hundreds of times. He reported holding it in for extended periods. The likelihood of ErrB part is only needed if one takes the side that "the competitor is lying."

Nice run, Eric! And Louise = salal looked very good. Pavlina and Sam were both pretty close.

ebone and others >> With direct connections to the SI team here at WOC (they sit next-door) I can deny the rumours that Oli´s mispunch was at the radio control. His missing punch was from the control with code 88 and this was not a radio control.
And yes it appears he punched too fast and therefore had no information whatsoever in his e-card other than the first 'clearing step'. As for the rest I can make no comments on behalf of SI technology...

Thanks, Vladimir! We'll see what I can do in the sprint tomorrow. With less than 12 hours to start time, my legs are still pretty tired from yesterday. On the other hand, I did do a fair number of short intervals and hills this year, so I'm hoping that gets me through at least the first few minutes tomorrow.

With a second place in the Relay at a WOC a long time ago in a country far away, the British team can hardly be considered an underdog.

GBR is also ranked 5th in the Federation World Ranking.

I had exactly the same thought. The Brits as an underdog??? They're so far away from the real underdogs they can't even tell if the underdogs have tails or not. But that's ok. If they'd rather cast themselves as underdogs rather than "contendahs", more power to them! ; )