Discussion: post WOC withdrawal

OK so after following WOC the last week I'm asking the question 'Now what?'. Sorta the same feeling that many Canadians had when the Vancouver Olympics finished. Spectator withdrawal!

So last night I tried following a local 24 hour adventure race that some club members are organizing this weekend but 'meh' the online coverage just ain't in the same league (things happen too slowly...although it was fast for AR). So.... now what?

I gotta admit I haven't been a fan of annual WOCs because of the strain it places on some country's budgets but now from a spectating perspective I can't wait until the next one. Will Canada's women improve on their 12th place finish. Can Will Critchley or Patrick Goeres break into the top 20-25 in the sprint final? What damage will Emily Kemp do in her first final? I think I found watching WOC that extra inspiring given the success especially of our Canadian women. Canada went into WOC with a Top 16 goal and then exceeded that goal with a 12th place finish in the relay. We had several mid 30's placings in the individual races (3 by women and 1 by Will Critchley). These more ambitious (but as we saw totally achievable) goals are a refreshing change from the "hope to make a final and beat the Americans" goals of the past.

Congrats to all the North American athletes for making WOC that much more fun to watch. (It makes being sick and injured easier).

How many days until Switzerland 2012?

Only 327, thanks to the Olympics.

hmmm, that puts WOC immediatly after JWOC. Too bad since there seemed to be number of JWOC runners at this years WOC including two medal winners: Ida Bobach, Middle distance gold at JWOC, silver at WOC and Tove Alexanderson, Relay Gold at JWOC, Bronze at WOC (and maybe there were more). I guess next year they'll need to choose between JWOC relay or WOC Sprint if any juniors want to do both.

Way to coordinate events, IOF...

...and of course they are the same week as O-ringen in Sweden...

Of course we could always try to persuade the IOC to move the Olympics.

Bubo>> Actually, WOC is the week prior to O-Ringen and the O-Ringen organizers have accommodated the Elite runners in the program by shifting their start one day.

This is all moot of course, but: Why could WOC not have been scheduled after the Olympics which end August 12th. I think that previous discussions about this have been that arranging WOC too late will not be possible due to not having volunteers. But as far as I can see school starts again August 27th so summer vacations should still allow WOC work.

There is also a concern organising WOC in the hottest part of the summer. It is a tough burden on the athletes.

Ooops - my mistake. I guess I was referring to the dates of the 3-day event and training races (Tour de Halland) prior to O-ringen that I read about in the O-ringen folder... O-ringen starts on the 22nd.

Does anyone has information about WOC timing problems/errors. For example in W relay, in results Sweden is 2 seconds after FInland, in TV the difference is about 8 second. Norway's time difference ti winner doesn't match either. It doesn't matter much in relay, but the fact they could't make the timing work in relay makes me wonder if there was errors in individual races too. Has anyone noticed similar cases in individual races, like runners finishing together but getting several seconds diffrent finish time.

I suppose timing in individual events used the "gate timing" + punching at controls with SI, that should have worked fine I hope.

My guess is (without having looked closely in the result list) that times shown for the relay may be the actual time when runners punched the SI unit behind the finish line. I don´t know if they even used "gate" for timing at the relay.

On legs one and two the runners actually changed over to the next runner before crossing the finish line (or at least the gate visible to spectators if that was the same).

Time maybe wasn´t conisdered that important - more the finishing order...

Is anyone aware of a video camera that (1) has an internal GPS, and (2) can display the current, very correct GPS time in the recorded video? Seems like a useful feature.

It is just a bit strange we have world champs with electronich punching, foto cells and video cameras and everything but still medalist's time is that much wrong in official results week after the race.

There was already very similar timing error not so many weeks ago in the Göteborg knock out sprint. I belive world cup points are still wrong and can't be fixed because wrong people ran the TV final.

The Sprint Final in Kiev was off by something like 23 seconds (everyone was timed faster than reality). Nobody seemed to notice or complain.

@hammer
Im sure someone else has already said this, but the world champs in atheltics is happening right now. That should bring some excitement for a few more days; 27th august to 4. september.

I wonder what sort of things we can moan about with Athletics World Champs.

I was disappointed by the route choice offerings in the 10000m.

haha, nice.

Think the most exciting was the drama behind bolts "early" start in the finals, or that Pistorius made it to the semi-final. An inspiring story.