City of London Orienteering Race

What an event. If you haven't seen it I recommend starting by looking at the map and courses in Routegadget and then seeing gg's video. Then there are the results plus lots of pictures, discussion and comments from officials on the official event web site.

The map, produced by Ollie O'Brien, is a pure work of art. There laid out in front of you is the whole City of London, from the remains of the Roman walls (in the olive green just north of control 135) to St Paul's Cathedral (control 151) to modern skyscrapers such as the Gherkin (control 137).

This was a chance to orienteer around the streets of London, which on its own would have made a great day out. The street network is not particularly complex, but it is good enough to make the navigation interesting, and around every corner you find a view of some well-known building to distract you. The start and finish were in Broadgate Arena next to Livepool Street Station (as shown in the photo of prizegiving on the left). The majority of the 400 competitors arrived by public transport and could sit in the warm sunshine while they waited to start or to discuss route choices after they had finished.

But the added element on top of all that was the final few controls spread around the Barbican Centre. The is spread over multiple levels, and proved a real challenge to map. Never before have so many people been so confused by so few controls.

It's also worth looking at Ollie's web site where he explains some of the technology behind the race.

Don't Miss This

I spent last Saturday checking control sites for the City of London Orienteering Race on October 11th. All the photos in the mosaic on the left were taken from somewhere on one of the courses. Despite having lived and worked in London for over 25 years I still visited places I had never been to. At one point I was in a deserted maze of narrow alleyways behind the Bank of England when a lone runner came round the corner at high speed. It was Brooner, the Event Organiser, out test-running the long course. I said these alleyways were just like Venice. He thought it was like Istanbul. In future you can say that other places are just like the City of London. Ten minutes later I met him again in a deserted churchyard. The map is a true work of art on its own.

Don't miss it. This will be something special.

Click here for an enlarged version of the picture.

Golden Graham (and JD and Jamie)

What can you say. GG cruises round to come back fourth. JD decides that isn't good enough and comes back in the lead. Jamie is caught by Thierry and then Novikov. Clive Allen convinces us all that France and Russia are fighting for the Gold with GB settling for Bronze. Jamie suddenly catches Novikov back up despite a longer gaffle. Thierry swallows a bee, gets stung and ends up walking. Jamie's TracTrac route shows him missing control 25 by miles, but somehow he ends up in the lead at the next control and is clearly running much more strongly than Novikov. And that's the race over. JD and GG struggle to keep up with Jamie down the run-in, Dave Peel gets in on the act on the finish line and GBR have a third WOC Gold medal. Just how WOC should always be.

There has been much Nopesport comment about the shorts. You will see from the attached photo that GG was already sporting them at WOC 2008 in the Ukraine when they lined up for this "we'll be World Champions this time next year" photo.

Having now had a chance to watch the Czech TV coverage it strikes me that it was excellently done, especially given that it went out in real time. (The internet streaming from the Czech TV website simply wasn't up to it during the race itself). TracTrac almost proved its worth, but the loss of contact and occasional strange position reports mean that it can't quite be relied on to fill in the gaps between even quite a large number of TV cameras. Clive did a valiant typing job, which I then had to balance with numerous (and in fact too many) on-line radio controls, plus trying to keep up with the Test Match at Headingley and the Open Golf at Royal Birkdale as well. If I was a betting person I might be asking for a steward's enquiry to work out quite what went on in that mad last ten minutes, and I'm sure we'll be hearing a bit more detail from those involved.

But for now we can just celebrate the new records: first British Relay Gold, Jamie becomes a double World Champion, GG becomes the 10th Brit with a WOC medal (and saves himself a BOF membership fee for life I'd expect). And just for me, my ongoing prediction of the emergence of China took a step forward with 7th place in the Women's race, and we had a fourth WOC race where Sweden, Norway and Finland failed to win a medal, and the third of these four where GBR won the Gold. Quite astonishing.

Another Full Set

How many runners have claimed a WOC medal in all four disciplines, counting Short and Middle as equivalent for these purposes? Remember Sprint only started in 2001 so many people never had a chance.

A quick think about it brings up the obvious candidate: Simone Niggli. After that I was struggling, but some analysis showed that Minna Kauppi has also got one of each. And then at yesterday's Middle race a third person joined the elite group when Vroni Koenig-Salmi claimed silver and completed a full set of Sprint, Middle, Long and Relay medals. The photo shows her on the way to Gold in the Sprint in 2001 in Finland.It also shows what may be the least attractive control site in WOC history: Tampere Greyhound Stadium toilet block, NW corner.

So who else could join this group in the near future. Looking just at runners at the 2008 WOC with three types of medal already we find people missing teh following types of medal:

• Sprint: Heli Jukkola, Marianne Andersen
• Middle: Andrey Khramov, Emil Wingstedt , Matthias Merz
  
• Relay: Yuri Omelchenko
• Long: Jamie Stevenson, Pasi Ikonen, Thierry Gueorgiou

The Sprint and Middle are over, so those five have missed out. I can't see the Ukraine sneaking a relay medal so it surely won't be Yuri. Pasi and Thierry aren't running the Long so it won't be them. But it just could be Jamie. One extra thing to cheer him on for on Saturday.

(Just for completeness, Valentin Novikov would have needed a Long and Sprint medal.)

And one final statistical excitement from yesterday. The men's race was only the third race in WOC history that Norway, Finland and Sweden all failed to win a medal. Unfortunately for me this was the first time it had happened when Great Britain didn't claim the associated gold medal.

Looking for a Level Playing Field

I'm fascinated by the question of which countries do best in which races. I guess this is partly driven by the British love of the underdog, so any "unexpected" success is to be applauded. Come on China (as long as you don't beat the GBR runners).

So it's time to look at the numbers. Take all individual WOC finals since 2001 (when the Sprint race was introduced). Allocate 50 points to the winner, 49 for second and so on for all finishers. Add up the scores for each country. Then to allow for the fact that I have included the 2008 Sprint race result already, normalise by looking at percentage of the total number of points scored. What do you get and what does it mean?

What you get is the table at the bottom of this post. What it means is much more open to question but let me offer some thoughts. Little if any of this is statistically significant, but it's fun anyway.

1) The totals column shows that world orienteering falls neatly into four groups.

• At the top we have the big four: Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Norway. They are in fact remarkably evenly balanced on the calculations used here.
• Then we have a group of eight countries with consistent solid results: Russia, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Denmark, France, Lithuania and Australia. Russia are probably making the move towards the big time, but I'd need time to do some moving average calculations to back this up. Lithuania and Australia are possibly surprise nations at this level.
• The third group consists of Estonia, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Spain and New Zealand.
  
• And then there is a fourth group of everyone else, none of whom are even yet close to making the move up to the third division.

2) Looking at the Sprint race column:

• Finland, Norway, Russia, Estonia seem to do worse in Sprint races than their overall performance. Norwegian and Finnish results appear very bad indeed in comparison with the other two disciplines.
  
• Great Britain, Austria and possibly Japan, the United State, China, Croatia and South Africa seem to do better in Sprint races than their overall performance

3) Looking at the Middle race column:

• Great Britain, Denmark, Bulgaria, Hungary and Belgium seem to do worse in Middle races than their overall performance.
  
• Finland, France (the Thierry factor), Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and the Netherlands seem to do better in Middle races than their overall performance

4) Looking at the Long race column:

• France, Lithiuania, Australia, Poland and Japan seem to do worse in Long races than their overall performance.
  
• Norway, Russia, Estonia and Germany seem to do better in Long races than their overall performance.

5) Switzerland and Sweden are notably consistent across all disciplines.

6) A final note of hope for the smaller nations: the only appearances of a "big four" nation in the "worse than normal" list are Finland and Norway in the Sprint race. This is the discipline where you probably have the best chance of success, whatever that means.

It's the Middle race tomorrow. Watch out for Finland, France, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and the Netherlands I reckon.

TV or not TV...

Well that was fun. Everything about the Sprint Race looked good, with a fantastic old town centre as a start and finish area, a detailed area of parkland and gardens right next to the town to provide some intricate control picking, some really tricky long route choices and more TV cameras and radio controls than I could believe. Juggling the internet technology proved quite hard as you ended up trying to keep three or four split time windows open at the same time as leaving the live TV feed visible. The TV quality via the internet was a bit variable, and the radio controls seemed to stop updating occasionally, but overall there was certainly enough to keep me interested for both races.

Czech TV seemed to settle for presenting the event as a race rather than anything more complicated, which seemed to work fine. There was no tracking, and only brief glimpses of a map, so the navigational element of the coverage was minimal. But for sprint races you can get quite a good feel for what is going on just by watching someone standing still and panicking for two or three seconds just the wrong side of a flower bed. And there was certainly some pretty impressive control flow to watch as well as contrasting techniques for crossing the water feature. Trying to make the coverage any more complicated, especially in real time and with such a short winning time, probably isn't worth the effort. Maybe it would have been interesting to focus in the big route choice decision from the start triangle: left or right? The first starter went left, most of the rest seemed to go right. Perhaps the Czech commentary picked up on this. They certainly spotted Emil Wingstedt leaving out a control, although this led to little more than slightly raised voices talking a little faster than normal. We got to see people clearly running very fast and also clearly having to navigate very carefully. Overall I thought it was great, but I guess the question is whether it would attract non-orienteers.

In terms of results it looks like a game of two halves: men and women. For the men there were 11 countries in the top 12 places, with many of the lesser nations such as Slovakia, Lithuania, Austria and the Ukraine fighting for top places. Khramov and Hubmann were simply in a class of their own, but the next 30 runners finished within a minute. The women's results show a different pattern. In what should surely be the most open women's race of the Championships the top 17 places all went to runners from the traditional orienteering strongholds (allowing myself licence to include Great Britain and France in there). The first "minor" nation was China in 18th place. Two of the three Chinese women mispunched, but they can clearly run pretty fast. Surely the sprint will be where they finally break through, but how long will we have to wait?

Born to Run

So was JWOC the biggest thing to hit Gothenburg last week? To be honest it probably didn't even make it to top of the list of little things to hit Gothenburg last week. Dominating the city were two things: Bruce Springsteen playing two nights at the Ullevi Stadium as part of his latest World tour, and the Partille Cup. This seems to be the handball equivalent of O-Ringen, and had attracted 20,000 handball players from around the world. Walking around the city centre there were flags and banners publicising handball everywhere, as well as many teams all of whom seemed to be six inches taller than the average Swede. As for Bruce this seems to be the biggest thing that will happen to Gothenburg this year judging by the newspaper coverage it generated. Ironically some of the JWOC runners I talked to didn't even know who The Boss was, but he does let me get in one of the all-time classic orienteering song titles. For me he also provides one of my main memories of APOC 1990 in Canada when a "three in a row" slot on the radio featured Bruce as we travelled through Calgary.

But getting back to JWOC it was really business pretty much as usual for the Long and Relay. No great surprises at the front (other than possibly how close the men's Long race was), and another set of British results that were difficult to get excited about but equally weren't too bad. How many times have I said that about Brits at a World Championships? Given the other distractions in Gothenburg it was always going to be difficult to get much attention for JWOC. Even so it did seem to be a very small and inconspicuous event, and I was particularly surprised at how few Swedes turned up on home terrain to cheer on a stream of medals.

WOC 2008 starts tomorrow in the Czech Republic with the Sprint race. One question that does arise is to what extent success at JWOC feeds through into success at WOC. It seems clear that not every JWOC champion progresses to the very top level at senior level, and it is equally clear that success at JWOC is not necessary to make it to the top at WOC. Perhaps something to look at further when I have some time, but for now the real thing is about to start. Time for some serious internet spectating I think.