Discussion: Photos from US Champs sprint

Here are some of my better photos from today's Sprint action

Looks as if that guy in the blue shirt with yellow stripes got his head, shoulders and right arm over a fence marked uncrosssable, hand on the fence?

Is that a foul?

I think that would be a particularly heartless interpretation of the rules ;-)

This is the photo
The gray fence is "forbidden to cross" and the black fence is not mapped. In the rules there is no definition that I can find about what "crossing" is - if someone's head crosses the feature is that forbidden?? At the French WOC Sprint final a number of years ago I think they ruled that you can't put a foot in a forbidden area feature, but other parts of your body could be above it. But I don't know any precedent for what constitutes crossing a line feature.

"Crossing" is an interesting word because you could jump across a feature and not disturb it which is clearly "crossing". But you could also reach across (eg: to punch a control on the other side of an uncrossable feature) without disturbing the feature (eg: flower bed, or fence) - would that violate the rule since only your hand (and SI stick) crossed the feature.

In this case though any official complaint against the runner would I think have to be thrown out regardless since in ISSOM the rule is:

The course planner should not encourage unfair actions from the competitors, such as crossing barriers or areas with forbidden access. If it is unavoidable to set legs that cross or skirt areas with forbidden access or impassable walls and fences, then they have to be marked in the terrain, and observers should be present at the critical points.

In this case the route choice was to run to the end of the forbidden-to-cross fence (the grey one) and cross there. But the other fence (the black one) was not mapped, so it was not clear where the forbidden area ended and so it should have been marked (if you intend to DQ people for crossing it). In fact some people were so cautious about not crossing a forbidden feature that the ran all the way to the end of the unmapped fence to be sure - something is wrong in that I think.

Thanks for the description. I think most of these debates stem from the fact that between the mapping symbols and rules we simply do not do a very clean job of differentiating between 'physical cross-ability' and 'permission to cross'. I maintain that the O-map should depict the geographic reality of what is on the ground. Whether one is allowed to go into an area is a human-imposed issue over the landscape (and often temporal); information that should be separate from the map's depiction of the land. In this case: low fence, and high fence, and area marked as OOB with purple lines or light shading. And don't get me started on the "ugly green"....

And in this case the situation was even more difficult to map. At the point where the picture is taken there is no reason for the fence to be forbidden to cross, but a little bit further (off the right of the image) there is a huge drop (into a river I think). So then the issue is where to stop marking the fence as forbidden to cross. I think picking the end of the fence was the best choice.

For anyone following that photo seems to be #15 on Blue [RouteGadget]

Forbidden features should be treated as infinitely tall solid objects. You may not reach through or over, but course setters should also place flags far enough away that reaching from the other side of uncrossable feature is not possible.

@Delyn - I agree with your very clear view of uncrossable/forbidden features - it is really, really good. But is that your opinion, or is there some rule or precedent backing that up? In other words, if I'm on a jury and the issue arises, is there something specific I can refer to?

I have read numerous discussion of the topic on nopesport and that was the view reach. After many seasons of urban courses and discussions when there have been issues with fences and gates they have seeming to gotten that consensus on how to treat uncrossable features to make it black and white. It takes some time to educate competitors and course planners, most just unaware they are breaking a rule.

Nice to see this picture because I experienced it first hand and interpreted as said photo (that being said, my whole body was physically over the black fence and not the grey) I think it is all "okay" because the grey fence on the right led to a drop of death, where as the black fence to the left was perfectly fine to cross. So it matches Upnorthguy's description of mapping what is physically in the terrain.

I think a cross-able fence symbol to the left (the black fence in the photo) on the map would not have been incorrect to show. That way you'd know "this part is cross-able and this part is not" and there would not be any uncertainty in the competitors mind.

What I think is a bit ironic is the physically grey fence in the photo is portrayed as "black uncrossable" on the map, and the physically black fence on the left of the photo could be mapped as a cross-able wall in grey! Confusing!

That's pretty funny
Maybe is something should use real colors to make map reading simpler ;)

That would make map printing super easy not required for ski-o.