Discussion: Forbidden areas

So was the jury asked to rule on DSq for athletes who ran quite a way in olive green? If so seems odd that this is not a DSQ.

Yes, that one went to the jury (the organisers let the results stand but another team protested against them). It's become reasonably accepted practice now (I can think of at least two previous precedents at WOC) that disqualification is not normally applied if the athlete enters the OOB by mistake and comes back out the same way they came in, thus gaining no advantage.

As to what the runners thought they were doing, that one's a bit of a mystery (I haven't been there, but I gather that the olive strip was the sort of strip of rough grass/rubbish/place for local drug deals that you'll find between railway lines and adjacent buildings anywhere in the world).

Dont know if this Video from Facebook will work

https://www.facebook.com/100001930131990/videos/52...

That's a pretty clear case of Whoopsie, didn't realise that I needed to hang a hard right under the railway bridge!

Also, this: https://www.attackpoint.org/discussionthread.jsp/m...

They got a long way before realising they weren’t next to the rather large linear water feature. Oops. Goes to show even the fastest can make silly mistakes.

Makes perfect sense. They were a train so they followed the railway track.

Maybe next time those 4 are running together they'll remember to assign someone navigation duties.

I was interested by Ralph's analysis that if he hadn't lost time early on he might have been at the front of the pack and then none of them would have made the mistake...

There was a lot of pack following into dead ends (one in particular) in the QF. Saw one guy in a group of six not follow the others into the dead end buy then got immediately caught after they reemerged because he was standing still looking at his map.

Visited the scene of the crime while walking around town this evening. It would have been easy to think initially that the dead-end path was the continuing one (on the ground it looks like it's the one that continues straight ahead), but I'm mystified as to how anyone could continue to think that for more than a few metres after leaving the concrete and ending up on a surface that was more broken glass than grass or gravel (and that was before having to cross a fence and crash some vegetation).

I read one runner's account that the dead end after #2 was indicated on a previous map with an open gate. This is one of the perils of over familiarisation with previous versions rather than what's in front of you on the day. Similar thing happened to one of our locals at the 2014 Aus Sprint when a previously passable area was now marked impassable but he went through it and was subsequently 'confronted' by another runner after the race for his indiscretion (he tried to DQ himself but his result never got updated that I could see).