Discussion: Vlad's A Meet of the Year Award (and Not)

If you are an event official faint of heart and easily offended by the phrase "USOF Rules", I suggest that you do not read.

Interesting article. You'll probably catch some flack for it. But, writing about quality is a good idea.

I think you're absolutely right about the top event -- the GMOC A meet.

In my opinion, you were a bit generous with the Idaho event. Despite extensive disclaimers and explanations of the problems with the map, I found it was enough of a problem that it took a lot away from the overall experience.

I'd also say you were a bit harsh in your judgement of SMOC. The second day was really quite nice. Maybe it wasn't enough to make up for the problems with the course setting on day 1.

Let's see, you rank the Idaho meet second, even though the map was "pretty bad." Apparently they get extra credit for having a small club and low standards?

All a club has to do is proclaim how bad things will be and then produce a mediocre event and Vlad will think it's great?

Come on, Vlad, you can do better. I'm used to (and enjoy) you being opinionated, but usually you show more intelligence.

I'd put the order:
1. GMOC
2. Quantico/US Champs
3. DVOA/US Short Champs
4. WCOC.
(I'm not sure where Wyoming fits in, but reports from there were very positive.)

The success of the Idaho event was in that there was a reasonably high degree of fairness in the competition despite very limited resources. Many event organizers could learn from that and focus on fairness instead of superficial stuff like e-punching. Certainly an exquisite map with all things mapped precisely adds pleasure to the connoisseur's delectation. When I orienteer, however, I focus on simplifying things and making quick decisions in order to cover the course in a minimum amount of time. This task was not hindered by the map in Idaho, supplemented by the event packet notes. This is why I don't think the Idaho event was mediocre; in my view it was good. For a persnickety map devourer, it certainly wasn't.

I'm surprised that there isn't a greater outcry regarding the production quality of maps. It's becoming the exception that you get an offset printed map at an A-meet. The maps at SMOC and the Raven Rock would be marginal at a local meet.

I think USOF needs to step in here and start enforcing some standards for map production. The A-meet application asks if offset printed maps will be used. I'm not sure what happens if you say "no." I would expect that a representative of the competition committee would then have to approve the alternative produciton method, but I'm pretty sure that's not happening.

I wasn't at the Idaho meet, so I have to rely on what I heard or read. And one of the things I read was Vlad's account on Attackpoint. Here are a couple of his comments from Day 1:
-- Deviated to the right on an unmapped "trail", hit the field, saw the main trail in the distance. Not a loss for this map.
-- The terrace on which both controls were was mismapped—the cliff shown at the bottom of it and my rootstock, at the top, whereas the cliff actually was at the top and the rootstock, even higher.

And fromDay 2:
-- I went along the semi-open boundary (the semi-open to the NE of the control) to avoid the woods. Andy found a trail through the woods, leading to the control, and was a minute and a half faster.
-- Missed a contour low. I don't count errors like that on a map like we had.
-- SW to trail, S on the trail while fuming about mismapped trail bends, SW on an indistinct trail, saw the control traffic from the indistinct trail.
-- SE through the medium green (which wasn't), top of pointy gully, S along the mismapped trail to the bag (visible almost from the trail).
-- Started to feel fainty as soon as I left #11. Hit the trail, NE on the trail to Day 1's start, then straight in. Found two unmapped logging trails on approach and was confused for a while.

And from his training log (reporting on picking up some controls Saturday afternoon):
-- During Day 1, I zigzagged through the unmapped vegetation, choosing the path of least resistance no matter how much longer the distance turned out to be. I originally thought that it was a net time loss to do so, and was disappointed about a 4.6 minute, 264 m leg 5, on which I basically took a 90 degree turn, out to the open as "fast" as possible, then along the boundary of the open. I walked the same leg during the pick-up along the straight line. I immediately got stuck in unyielding high bushes, and most of the 264 m was crawling—hardly doable in under 5 minutes.

Three points --

1. Nothing about this seems "fair". Being warned about a bad map doesn't cancel out the bad map. You have to make route choices without an idea of what lies ahead.

2. There are ways to adjust your tactics to cope with a bad map. There are ways to adjust course setting to cope with a bad map. But a bad map is still a bad map. (And having learned my orienteering on USGS maps, and having enjoyed many a rogaine on just awful maps, I don't consider myself a "persnickety map devourer".)

3. I'm perfectly happy to give lots of credit to a small club trying to put on an A meet under difficult circumstances. But that's not a reason to pick it as one of the best meets of the year.

The Idaho organizers told us the following:

(1) The contours were interpolated USGS.
(2) The vegetation boundaries (woods vs. open) were accurate.
(3) The green was not mapped accurately, and the woods were mostly second-green.
(4) Point features were GPS'd and were accurate.
(5) There were unmapped logging roads.

Mismapped trail bends usually happen plenty with even the "better" mappers. We weren't told about those, and hence my disappointment. Everything else, however, was exactly what the organizers told us; except for a couple of cases, it was safe to assume that the woods were light or medium green and go from there. The mapping was consistent, it just did not agree with the standards.

So what exactly is fair? Orienteering fairness seems to me to be that the competitors can solve the problem posed by the course setter based on their skill and not luck, and that their results should reflect the amount of skill. In the case of the Idaho meet, the required skills involved not just the interpretation of the map, but also taking into account the information from the organizers. The element of luck was minimized by the course setting and by giving out the correct info.

Notice that in my comments, I note how the mapping was bad (=disagreeable), but with the exception of Day 2's Controls 1, I would not consider the mapping to cause unfairness. (Control 2 on Day 2 was mis-described; not a map issue, and really the biggest problem during my two runs.)

Suppose someone not familiar with the Swedish mapping style goes out to her first O-Ringen and finds all those unmapped cliffs. Certainly she would consider the mapping disagreeable, and possibly would be confused and lose time. But someone who knows that any bare rock that is climbable is mapped with contours, not the gray, would find the map good.

I'm not saying that CTOC maps were O-Ringen's quality. I'm trying to say that there's more to fairness than a good map. I'm really sorry for not having the time to research the source, but among one of the links, I believe, at Spike's blog that I clicked on in the past few months, there is a comment from some good orienteer how one needs to know the peculiarities of the woods in Southern Sweden vs. Northern Sweden in order to make the correct route choice. In one of them, you should take the high route on the bare rock; in the other case, it is the low places between the hills that are the fastest. You need to know that beforehand, there is no way to get that info from the map. Yet Tiomilas and such rotate regularly, and people don't bitch about thees specifics.

What I'm trying to get to is that there does not seem to be enough awareness among event organizers in the US that fairness is the overriding principle. The Idaho people knew that, and made the event as fair as the bad map allowed. In other cases, course setters managed to make events less fair given a much better map. I'd go as far as to say that US Champs Day 1, Blue was less fair than Idaho Day 1 because of the pit control.