Discussion: bad choices for control placement

so.... what's your story?

Bad choices pic.twitter.com/hirtxPLrqp

— Raccoongaine (@Raccoongaine) March 3, 2020

Not a control placement, but the bridge over a river to get to the starting point for one of the public JWOC 2015 races (the one where I was the course planner) was flushed away by a severe rainstorm. :-(

We also had to build a new bridge 5m south of the fixed bridge/ford (a set of stepping stones) that almost all courses had to cross to get to the final 2-3 controls, that 5m offset caused at least one very irate runner to skip the control located at the end of the ford. (Irate when we DSQ'ed him.)

From my point of view, many of the controls in GAOC's Extreme O are in bad places. Having to crawl through cold muddy water to a control hanging in the outlet pipe from a dam is not a good placement. Oh, but that is part of Extreme O and people love it.

The Great Miami River devoured this control

Conversely, I had some fine control placements for a canoe-O once, everything was great when I paddled out and hung them (I think the day before the event). But the venue was right above a power generation dam and downstream from a pumped storage facility, and by race time the water level had dropped enough that several controls were in mud flats well away from the river.

We had a local meet in Central Park, NY years ago where one control was placed in front of some thick bushes that turned out to be some grungy homeless guys lair.
After a few people punched, he came out and was lurking about looking irritated. If I recall correctly, he took the control.

There was, of course, the infamous 1996 World Cup race in Switzerland where the supports of the bridge between the last control and the finish were washed away with about 30 runners still to finish.

What about the control in Harriman State Park that was in an area with a forest fire and runners had to go through burning embers to get to it?

Many years ago, there was a problem with a control at a meet near Ottawa. Starters were told to skip one control on the course. A mother bear and her cubs were in a tree above the control.

At a paddle O last year controls were placed so as to be accessible but not that easy for passers by to abscond with them. Trouble was control hanging takes time and by the end of the event the tide had gone out so no longer albeit shallow water but rather thigh high mud to be negotiated to punch several controls!

At one of the events in Rotorua between the 2017 Oceania Championships and WMOC, a control was deleted from the M21E course because a new volcanic steam vent had opened up near it the night before the event.

Wow! And I thought I'd had it bad when for a competition in a park along the gulf coast of Florida it seems the field work, control site checking and control placement had all been done at low tide The competition was held at high tide. It was a shin deep wade to get to the control or at best a very long reach. The participants took it all in stride, thought it was pat of the game.
Oh well, at least it wasn't at the Bay of Fundy (highest tide difference in the world).

Several years ago I was setting out controls for a training in the forest just next to Oslo. I discovered that one of the locations, a little reentrant, had been used as a toilet for a camp of 50-100 people currently living in that section of woods. It did not seem like they were using any shovels. I told people to skip that control.

Cristina wins.

Blair, though, has the runner-up, methinks.

Blair's example reminded me of an O-map of Hell (not Michigan) that someone put together back in the late 80s -- it had intermittent pits.

That was Tom Delaney's work. I have a copy around somewhere.