Discussion: WOC Sprint Relay

Start list:
https://eventor.orienteering.org/Events/Entries?ev...


NorAm and Oceania Teams

Canada
1 Emily Kemp
2 Will Critchley
3 Damian Konotopetz
4 Emma Waddington

USA
1 Samantha Saeger
2 Giacomo Barbone
3 William Enger
4 Hillary Saeger

Australia
1 Krystal Neumann
2 Leon Russell Keely
3 Henry McNulty
4 Natasha Key

New Zealand
1 Jula McMillan
2 Tim Robertson
3 Ross Morrison
4 Laura Robertson

Anyone know offhand the best ever placings for these teams in the Sprint Relays?

aus 10 (2014)
nzl 12 (2015)
can 22 (2015)
usa 26 (2015)

Next round of the A.P.O.C.

Whatever happened to APOC ?

Disappeared when the Asian Championships were set up as an official entity.

Does the sprint relay16:50 local (Sweden) start time translate to 12:50 Eastern (US)?

10.50 I think (about two hours from now, anyway).

Oh right. Having trouble with math this morning. ;-)

Emily Kemp tagged in 7th place; Samantha Saeger in 17th.

Wow, great job Kempster! Let's go CDN boys, stay cool for two legs!

Just saw Damian run through the stadium in the big second pack. Great fun!

Damian finishes in 15th...let's go Wil!!

Great job Emily and Sam

Will just got past by Norway with that "way to the left" route choice.

That's actually pretty cool to say ;-)

Come on WIll - go go go

Emma W's in a great scrap with Germany, Belarus, Bulgaria.
She just picked up a bit of time with a good route choice
Now does she have the legs to pass the others over the final four or five controls...

As the last teams approach the finish it looks (unofficially) like
21 Canada
22 Australia
25 New Zealand
26 USA

Shucks, doesn't look like it.
But great first WOC for Emma!

And a good result for Canada, improving one position from their previous best and finishing ahead of some chief rivals - NZL, AUS, USA ;-)

I wonder if, after Brexit, GB might come down and join us. After all it's eligible for the Anglo Phonic Orienteering Challenge.

Canada also managed to beat the Awards Ceremony.

Is there any reason they couldn't delay that a little longer and allow more teams to finish?

Canada top non europeans!

19-20-23-24 after a few teams are disqualified

AZ: Swedish TV-slot ended at 18.00. They could probably have delayed it 2 more minutes, but not more.

The artificial barriers (or at least I assume they were) were well done on the sprint maps. Instead of a small uncrossable fence they used a broad out of bounds area. Smart. It meant that it created more route choice without creating silly traps. The long leg to #1 and the variety of route choice was brilliant.

Congrats to Denmark on the repeat.

I thought these courses were way more interesting than the individual. And you're totally right about the barriers.

Was there a big overlap with the individual final? I've always thought that our humble little sprints could stand two events on the same area on the same day (we used to do this with middle). But WOC?

there was decent overlap with the Swedish sprint champs map from just 7 years ago. ;-)

@hammer: Both the individual and the relay overlapped a lot with the 2009 Swedish sprint championship, and since that event was for both senior and junior runners you can assume that almost every current swedish woc runner took part.

Adding the public access extension last fall just to cover the last swedish training camp in the area adds a bit of insult to the injury, but I still think this was a good pair of sprints.

The public races were a lot of fun as well. :-)

Surely WOC wasn't set up to benefit the locals????

But Sweden didn't win. With all the terrain information available now, perhaps the "unfamiliar terrain" notion is old history. And its always a problem for an urban area.

Note that my key idea is not how to run WOC, but to make good use of an area, start/finish facilities, volunteers, etc for our down-home sprints by running 2 or 3 as one meet. The period between (while planners change a few controls round, move some artificial barriers) can be a great social time, hopefully within reach of some good cafes.

my comment about Sweden was meant as a joke and it demonstrates we as a sport don't need to continually be looking for new terrain because as Grover said "Sweden didn't win". I felt that the courses were excellent as they had lots of route choice and cameras were throughout the city capturing runners throughout. I'm not a fan of the maze-like trap heavy sprints but these courses got the route choice side of the sport right allowing for the athleticism of the worlds best to shine. ie race not lost by teams or individuals being trapped by hard to see dead-end traps.

But back to the athletes.

Fantastic result by UK besting their 6th in 2014 with Kris Jones rocking that 3rd leg. big shout out to Charlotte Ward (who lived in Hamilton for a year a few years back) for a strong first leg -holding her own against Emily Kemp. and speaking of Emily what a great WOC Sprint relay debut on the lead off leg for Canada.

Canada improves from 26th in 2014 (~18% back to 22nd last year (~15% back) to 19th this year (~14% back). Getting closer to the top 10 each year. Oh and for those keeping track at home the US has never beaten Canada at the WOC Sprint relay. ;-)

@Hammer "Brit almost keeps up with Canadian" shock. ?;)

We felt we had a strong team this year, Kris ran an amazing solo 14:20 for 5km last week. Outside chance of a medal and so it proved - but 4th is a great performance for us.

What is it with the Russians?
Unjustifiably DQed at the relay last year, not allowed to protest,
drug tested out of hours and today DQed again.

As with Hammer, number of question marks in my post is inversely proportional to how seriously I meant my comment :P

We used to always try and find new terrain when hosting national level events here so as to not advantage the locals (although we needed all the advantage we could get) but at our last national event (2014) we decided that no other states do - at least for their sprints - so we didn't either.

And that turned out to be an awesome advantage for Sten... :)

He's still listed as official!

What was the reason for Russian DQ?

MP on the 1st leg??

http://obasen.orientering.se/winsplits/online/en/d...

Yes - MP when first to punch at a common control ... You can see her there on the TV :(

Emit has similar "no punch" issues as Sport Ident? Or was this something else?

I've no idea why it happened, but given the choice between finding out and blaming the athlete, I've little doubt what the IOF will do.

Just re-watched the TV-pictures. Emit touch-free. The russian quickly swiped her card about 30 centimetres from the unit, while looking the other direction, and I can't tell from the video if she actually checked the LED light afterwards. The other runners in the same group were a lot more careful both being closer to the unit, looking at it while punching, and making sure the "punch" was ok.

The instructions that weren't followed:

"In speed the punching is performed by holding the
emiTag 20-50 cm from the control for a short moment.
Stretch out your hand with the emiTag toward
the control and hold your hand still on top of the
control unit until you have past the control.
The LED light in the emiTag will start flashing, and
keeps flashing for 5 seconds after the punch.
NOTE! It is important to see this flashing, since
this is the only feedback telling you that the
punch is performed correctly!!!!!!!"

SI Air ftw.

Here are some Sprint Relay photos.