Discussion: NOC2005 Micr'O

Hiya,
Anybody out there with Norwegian TV? I'd be interested to know what you thought of the live middle distance coverage, in particular of the Micr'O orienteering concept. Others are also of course welcome to comment.

As a runner, well, firstly I was knackered, 8th consecutive day of orienteering... it did make the race more exciting and interesting. Slogging through a rough middle distance race and changing to a 1:5 map where everything comes fast and precision and not just "falling into" one's control is what counts gets the adrenaline flowing. The 20 seond (penalty loop) time pressure and the TV cameras are there, and for the Downhill'O second half were very disturbing.
I made two mistakes, one mispunch I was aware of and also punched the correct control (stony ground on the downhill) so I could skip a later one, the second I had thought was the reentrant following (was the map a little strange?), but actually was the final spectator control (all those people watching, why bother checking one's map carefully?)....

... penalty loops were nasty... at least I had only two...

and the last loop of normal orienteering was unnecessarily (unless you ask the tv company) easy, apart from the fatigue.

Afterwards I got to hang around in the arena a bit and watch runners come through, see how many mistakes they had made, do their penalty loops and come back into the finish shortly afterwards... it was VERY spectator friendly... it somehow involves the spectator a little bit more because not everybody does the same and there is that bit of suspense.

I didn't get to see much on the big screen (although I do remember Mats Haldin making a mess of the first control according to the GPS tracking)
noc2005 website with links to maps (including false controls), error analysis etc.

Wow, looks like Marcus and Toni were pretty clean!

Could someone please explain how this MicrObe game is played?

Interesting, Notodden is fairly close to where I grew up. I imagine it was pretty steep? I guess I'll look at the maps...

The rules

Here is my understanding. Each competitor is given a 1:5000 map with a 6 control course on it. At each control site, there can be up to 7 false controls. The competitor must run a penalty loop (approximately 17 seconds) for each mistake.

Only up to 7 false controls? How do the world's elite expect to prepare for a proper Prologue race?

Thanks Jeff - that explains it all. Although I guess you have to see it to appreciate whether it really is the answer to the perpetual media quandary.

Surely seems that micr-O is a neat and tricky format for the athletes to enjoy. To an O-devotee, it may all look supercool on a TV screen. To anyone else it *just* might look like an attempt to make orienteering, a sport poorly fit for television, look more like biathlon, a sport plainly boring on TV. Penalty loops? Sure, one can be argue that plain old x-c skiing is even less entertaining. The best-attended x-c ski race at the SLC Olympics were the Sprints. Where one could see almost the whole course from just about any vintage position, and the battle was head to head.

Same goes to GPS tracking: fun for us in the know to watch. Will that detour, say, Holger just took around the mountain pay off against the 60-meter climb by Mats? To bored couch potatoes, those blips on the screen must seem about as exciting as growing grass. Give us mud! Broken faces! Falls off cliffs! Assaults by attack badgers! Focusing on women's competition won't hurt. I think what the Forsberg team did at the 2004 WOC, plain old production with the focus on competition from several scenic locations and continuous updates of the race situation, was the best presentation of orienteering I've seen. GPS tracking and Micr-O seem well ahead of the market, and in an expensive way.

I feel the same as Vlad - especially about the GPS. I mean that is way cool to me but to the unwashed masses that must be like waxing on about charm mometum or beta decay.

Ahhh, where would we be without beta decay...

I was watching the broadcast on TV (being that I was home taking antibiotics instead of running). The Irish were actually quite well represented, with Ailbhe and Colm O'H both getting a lot of camera time. Marcus and Toni's butts also made brief appearances in the penalty loops. Sorry Neil but you didn't make it.

The broadcast was actually the best I have ever seen of orienteering, but that mainly thanks to all the camera positions (over 20 cameras in the woods, I heard) and the use of the GPS, NOT especially because of the micro. The filming during the "normal" orienteering captured "mud, broken faces, jumping off cliffs"-- all at high speed, showing the world's best as the great athletes that they are. Meanwhile the micro made the world's best orienteers look like idiots as they either stood like a deer in headlights (as Holger unfortunately did), or ran around like headless chickens. Kind of embarassing. Not to mention being pretty confusing to follow even for someone who has run micro before (OK, maybe I'm slow on the uptake).

The introduction of the micro-discipline has been hotly debated in Norway all winter. It is meant to imitate Biathlon, which is a VERY popular TV sport in Norway... as an attempt to get orienteering on TV. For those who can read Scandinavian you can find some of the discussions on www.opn.no, most recently a LONG debate regarding... the TV broadcast from NOC and Micro as a discipline.

Very many different opinions, many (myself included) not especially positive to micro as a discipline (a whole debate in itself). But the TV company that produced the NOC broadcast was very positive... so there will likely be more in the future. Rumor has it they are trying to convince the WOC 2006 organisers to change the middle to micro. We'll see.....

any video online anywhere?

Ah, Micr'O, just what the world needs. What's the best way to prove that Trail-O is real orienteering? Change orienteering to be more like Trail-O!

"It's not about what happens at the controls. It's about what happens between the controls." (TM)

gps tracking is principally to help the tv crews, not directly for the spectators

Backseat driver comment - it seems like it would be fairly easy to intuit which was the right control from the control codes. If you noticed that the first few valid controls had codes 18x, then you should be wary of punching a 21x next...

But that's just what they want you to think...

What makes you think the controls actually had codes on them?

If you look at the clue sheets on the maps...no control codes.

I like it when they use the GPS to show what is going on. It helped to explain the happenings during the long leg in Tiomila. I couldn't understand the announcers, but I sure knew what was happening. I think that the masses, not just the orienteers, appreciate it as well. I compare it to John Madden's screen pen when he is explaining plays during Monday night football or the Canadian equivalent when they show a particularly delicate shot in curling. I'm not a fan of football or curling (who is?), but I gained an appreciation for what the athletes were trying to accomplish.

So far I haven't seen very good GPS usage during broadcasts. They could do more.

Like Vlad said, last year's WOC coverage was very good. It was more exciting to watch than a lot of endurance sports and shows that with enough TV cameras in the woods orienteering is a very good spectator sport for the relay, middle, and sprint at least. WOC 2004 organizers could have improved coverage if they had GPS on the people. For example, instead of going to camera X and waiting for 90 seconds for someone to show up they could monitor the GPS and switch over exactly when they expect to see the person at the camera. Split screen would work well. The key is that it is a good live sport and can the sprint and middle can be packaged into a nice 1-2 hour time slot on TV.

Like the Norwegians, I also enjoy watching biathlon. Why? Because the lead can change at any time. One miss and it is a penalty loop or time penalty. You don't see much lead changing in endurance sports like the marathon or even a 10K. But surely a well covered orienteering race has more lead changes than most if not all endurance sports because of route choice, relative running strengths and of course execution of map reading and errors. So I'm not sure if micr-O really adds anything else to the sport. It does seem to be an interesting format it itself but it shouldn't replace middle distance.

Besides... didn't IOF introduce middle (short) and sprint as the TV version of the sport anyway?

Having said that if TV stations like micrO then the sport and IOF should listen. More TV means more $$ means more promotion - which orienteering needs. Remember how long it took IOF to accept the Park World Tour. Now sprint is a key part of any international O championship.

Take adventure racing for example. Without Eco-Challenge on TV I doubt ARwould have grown like it has. Globally AR still hasn't come close to orienteering in participation numbers- but in North America it gets more TV coverage and as a result is bigger here than orienteering. Which is odd, because quite frankly I don't think AR is that exciting a sport to watch on TV. (and that has even been told to me by media personnel that cover AR professionally). In 24 hour and multi-day events people aren't exactly moving that quickly - they are just plugging away/jogging/walking for a very very long time. How can this be TV friendly? Didn't IOF add shorten races to fit the short 1-2 hour TV splots. AR is 6-8hours minimum but the TV races are 24 hours to 6 days long. AR TV coverage is usually several months after the race since post production is essential - live coverage of AR would rank pretty low on the TV ratings. Because of the lower speed of the sport, the TV coverage of AR focusses on the determination and situations the athletes have to endure to complete the really long race. Eco-Challenge was shown more like a reality TV show than a sport. But it attracted a lot of people to the sport - and attracted a lot of money.

So if AR can be successful to watch on TV then orienteering is even better to watch - if promoted properly. Orienteering is navigation and running at HIGH SPEED. TV is already showing the "mud, broken faces, jumping off cliffs"-- all at high speed. This needs to be shown to the North American TV audience in a big way to get the big networks interested.

To me the problem is that they are trying to cover O' live on TV. They would get a much better show using the AR model -- take a bunch of tape, edit it a lot, make a good story out of it, and show it at some point in the future. It would be a lot more appealing.

Post-production of O footage also makes sense given that most events have staggered starts. I would imagine that you could make a much more interesting tv spot if you present the race more like a "head to head" event. This way the producers could also highlight legs that were tricky or were the cause of much lost time, falls, whatever...

In post-production, you could probably also superimpose footage of various people, as if they were running at the same time (given the right camera setup...). That would be pretty cool.

And yeah, post-production is generally how even _we_ get the most entertainment out of races. Just hanging around at events waiting for people to finish is not nearly as interesting as talking to them afterwards, comparing splits, posting stories on AttackPoint...

Somehow I think Steve Irwin (Crocodile Hunter) would be a great guy to narrate a post-production orienteering event report.

"See how this small Noweegen goy went strite over this big joyant mountan, and got stuck in this awful mass of vegetation. But this tall French guy went woy around this soide, where the forest wasn't neahly as thick..."

Edit it a lot, maybe. But don't rearrange it as "head to head", or add commentary that benefits from hindsight. It just saps the excitement from the unfolding event if there are hints that the commentator already knows the outcome. Similarly the "good story" must be put together with care, if it's to be the story of the immediate event rather than a remake of the mud and smashed faces that were popular in the broadcast last year.

Orienteering is like golf, in that the action is in multiple locations simultaneously, with the leaders not competing head to head, and critical errors are unpredictable. I occasionally find golf interesting to watch, and imagine that if O were produced for television with the same thoroughness, many would be attracted to it.

On the other hand, we can look at how the FIA World Rally Championships are covered -- they mainly cover each run separately, but also have some graphics which I think are really neat, which involve overlaying virtual cars on the course as if they had started at the same time. I've also seen that done in downhill skiing. I'd like to see more of it.

The problem is that none of real TV/Show professionals looked into investing time into O as an attractive sport. AR took only because they got big sponsors covering Eco-Challenge. Unfortunately, potential is there but it will not materialize unless we find similar solution.

Sprint series and NAOL can be staging grounds but will not florish without major support by professionals investing their time 100% into this.

Part of the reason AR attracts TV coverage is the 'look at those freaks' factor associated with people who would submit themselves to such pain, lack of sleep, injuries, death, etc etc. As proof, which AR races are covered: the sprint races, or the multi-day expedition races? Answer: the latter, which proves my point. Orienteering, while very athletic and cool in the 'micro' way (that suitably chosen five second episodes look really cool), does not have the 'look at those freaks' thing going (at least not in a good way... :) ). Think of AR TV programs as reality TV, not sport. (There is also the economics of expensive gear and sponsorship involved, but that is secondary.) I don't think there's much relevance for O from a TV-friendliness perspective.

But don't people care about watching people crash through trees, off cliffs, etc. at high speed? I like watching this stuff and trying to replicate it in my own slower manner.

But, I never saw AR on TV or any of those survival things - although I try to avoid TV generally - so maybe those things are cool or at least perceived so by enough people.

Is adventure racing a fad, btw?

I don't think adventure racing is a fad, if the explosion of triathlon is any indication. It seems that people naturally make the transition from "traditional" multisport races to AR.

Interestingly, I tried to get triathletes at U of A interested in orienteering, using the "this will help you in AR" spin, but got much less interest than from the geo types. I think it's because a lot of triathletes are all about numbers - maintain this heart rate for this long over exactly this course, etc., etc. Real nerdy types, and orienteering isn't as predictable. Ya know, all that on-the-fly thinking.

It seems like I just contradicted myself.