Estonia added to the list

Peter Hodkinson finishing in 13th place

Day 2, and the first day of the Estonian O Week, closely followed by the WOC Sprint Final. But first it was a trip to the WOC Event Centre to pick up our media passes, and to the supermarket so we had enough food to give us a chance of getting through the first few days. There was the usual fun of trying to work out exactly what we were buying, and what colour milk you needed (or indeed, what was milk at all), but so far the only mistake seems to have been buying tinned sweetcorn and finding the apartment doesn't have a tin opener.

The Spectator Race was based at the Tartu Song Festival Grounds, with the start and finish in an enormous concrete amphitheatre. The area was a mixture of ornamental parks, lakes, buildings, scattered woodland, a BMX track, a frisbee golf course and what felt like a skating rink to run on, but was in fact just the walkways around the main stadium. My 2.8km course had 26 controls which meant things happened quite fast. This was enough to cause a few map reading problems, especially given the amount of mapped detail that was less than obvious on the ground. But after 18 minutes and 56 seconds I had skated my way to the end of the run-in and added Estonia to the list of countries that I have orienteered in.

It was then a 20 minute walk back into the centre of town to arrive just in time for the start of the Women's sprint race. Ed Nicholas made a brief appearance, said hello and then dashed off to do important stuff. A lap of the Town Square finally located the Media Centre, and we managed to grab a start list and maps before heading out to try to get photos of all the British runners. This went OK for Alice and Jo (did these the easy way, as they left the start) but we then decided to head out into the area to get some action photos. We found a suitable control, and I worked out the best camera angle. Runner 36 came past: Megan is 38 so will be here in about two minutes. Three minutes passed and runner 39 arrived. It turns out that runners 37 and the camera-shy 38 had taken a different route choice. We quickly headed down the hill to get her on the second loop. As we set up in front of the TV control by the main University building we saw runner 36 followed by 37. And then my camera battery decided to die just as Megan came into view. I just managed to get back to the Media Centre, find my spare battery and rush out onto the balcony overlooking the run-in as she appeared round the corner to punch the last control. The photo made it to the BOF website, even if it is a bit of an awkward angle, but very few people will know the tension involved in getting it.

So then it was the men's turn. I thought I had learnt my lesson, so I got Peter as he started. Just need a photo of Chris now. Let's go for a shot of him running up the hill. Oh look, there's a good camera angle from behind the fountain and flags. Indeed there is, but if you get there 10 seconds after the runner has gone through then the resulting photo lacks a little something. I decided I couldn't muck around any longer, so stationed myself by the last control. This turned out to be a good spot, and I got some great photos of Peter finishing. Oh, and one of Chris as well.

Then it was another quick lap around the hill to see a few of the later runners on the last loop, and finally back to the Town Square to get a picture of a Finnish flag with Daniel Hubmann's legs coming out the bottom of it as he sprinted down the run-in to victory. This press thing is not turning out to be as easy as I'd hoped. But things improved when we finally tracked down some British team members, and I spent fifteen minutes interviewing Peter, Chris and Megan. They had all clearly had a fantastic time and were more than happy to tell people about it. Spirits are high in the GB camp, and tomorrow could be a good day. Mind you, it's almost tomorrow already, given how long it has taken to write various articles for various websites and sort through nearly 300 photos, some of which even show GB runners. And I even managed to set up Routegadget for the HH Saturday series that was taking place in Highfield Park at the same time that we were running in the Spectator Race.

That list in full for those desperate to know, in order of appearance: England, Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, South Africa, Swaziland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, New Zealand, Netherlands, France, Northern Ireland, Canada, USA, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Russia, Finland, China, Hong Kong, Australia, Spain, Italy, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Iceland, Estonia

I also get half a point for Portugal, where I did the IOF Event Advisor Course, but never managed to run an event.

Gallia est omnis divisa in tres partes

To get in the mood for something that might make an appearance tomorrow, we start with a Latin quote. “All Gaul is divided into three parts” according to Julius Caesar ('De Bello Gallico', Part 1, but wasn't Part 2 much better?) Wilson Hinkley, a geologist, noted that these were igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. But for our purposes, we are more interested in the three parts that WOC countries can be divided into when you look at the overall WOC medal table. (I realise this analysis struggles to cope with the break-up of countries since the late 1980s, but I think it is still a reasonable way of looking at things).

The first part consist of four countries, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Finland, who between them have won 480 WOC medals (158 gold, 167 silver and 155 bronze). They expect to win medals (note the plural) at pretty much every WOC, and when they don't there are questions asked.

The second part consists of five countries; Russia, Czech Republic, France, Denmark and, to be a little generous, Great Britain. These countries have won 115 WOC medals (41 gold, 34 silver and 40 bronze). They pick up a steady stream of medals, but it is still reasonable cause for celebration when it happens.

The third part consists of the remaining eight countries: Hungary, Ukraine, Latvia, Austria, Soviet Union, Australia, Belorussia, Germany and Italy. These countries have won 23 WOC medals (7 gold, 5 silver and 11 bronze). In many cases they are down to a single athlete putting it all together when it counts (such as Hanny Alston for Australia and Lucie Böhm for Austria). When these medals arrive it is party time for real.

What does this tell us about WOC 2017? The same four countries will take most of the medals. It will be a surprise, but not much of one, if GB can grab a medal. And we might see some new teams make it into the third part.There are two obvious candidates. First could be Belgium, with Yannick Michiels in the Sprint race. Secondly I’d go for Canada, where EmilyKemp continues to put in impressive performances and has been close before. After that who knows, but maybe an Estonian on home soil could do something special. But remember I spent a long time predicting that China would become a force to reckon with, and it hasn't really turned out that way.

So for the GB supporter you are left hoping we can reinforce our standing in the second tier of the table, but knowing that medals at World Championships are hard to get. If you look at the British medals to date there are some that we always knew would happen (Yvette and Jamie), some that we hoped would happen (Heather finally getting there in Japan, and Scott) and some that were a bit of a surprise (in which category I would put all three Men’s relay medals). This week I'd say there are two clear chances for a GB medal: Kris Jones in the Men's Sprint (if has recovered from recent injury), and the Mixed Sprint Relay team. Unfortunately the competition in both these races is very strong, lots of other countries think they will be taking the medals, and top six on the day could still be an excellent result. Of the other outside possibilities I'd go for the Men's Relay, after two years of being fourth.

Later in the week I'll look at how to work out how well we are doing even if we don't win any medals. The easy starting point is to see all runners qualify for the final. Job done in the Sprint. But for now, let the games begin.

Orienteering On Demand

After a lot of discussion I have finally developed a prototype of a web front end for my Orienteering on Demand concept. Helen has been looking at various ways of making permanent courses more usable (and used) and this often came down to some sort of mobile phone app. Last year we put together an Android app that read QR codes, recorded split times and then uploaded them to the web. What was really needed was a better web end to display results.

I've now put together a first attempt at that website. This turned out to be quite a lot easier than expected once I had discovered yii. (If you wouldn't know a PHP framework from an overgrown  re-entrant then don't worry. If you would, then yii is highly recommended.)

It's very early stages at present, but it shows a lot of the ideas. The bit I'm particularly pleased with is the GPX file upload. This allows you to upload a GPX file from a phone or watch, and then works out how close you got to each of the controls on a course. True virtual orienteering in action. The current site includes a few example GPX files of me running around the local park.

I'm still not sure quite where this is going. Do I want to run a single website for the world to use (the Winsplits approach) or would it be easier to allow clubs to run their own sites (the Routegadget approach)? Do I make it open source and let people add their own enhancements? Do I publish an API to allow people to interface their own apps? We'll see what the response is.

There's a lot more to do, but as a start I reckon this is now worth letting into the wild.

Westfield Orienteering

How difficult can it be to navigate round a shopping centre? Harder than you might imagine when it is Westfield overlooking the Olympic Park at Stratford, with four main levels plus three separate car parks each with nine floors. You can see a map extract on the left, and the full map is here. At one point I had to check the lift buttons to confirm that it wasn't possible to get to the Second floor of the shopping centre from where I was at the time. I least I didn't end up taking the lift between controls as many people did even if it is apparently quicker to go both up and down nine levels in a lift than it is to run the stairs. And just to put you off there was a view of the Olympic Stadium around every corner. I can confirm that the roof of Car Park A (that's level P9 if you are paying attention) should provide a great view of the Olympic Opening Ceremony. I wonder if they are selling tickets?

Meanwhile back at the orienteering, the event was the inspiration of Josh Jenner, who had negotiated access early on a Sunday morning, before the shops opened. The next master stroke was to convince Ollie O'Brien (the City of London Race mapper) to produce the map. Nearly 100 people took part, split over five mass starts at 15 minute intervals from 09.00 to 10.00. The start was headlong down the steps towards Stratford International Station, although some did turn straight round and head back indoors to avoid the cold wind. Control 101 was 10 m from the start horizontally, and an equal distance vertically. After that there was a chance to start working out how to join up all 28 controls on the 60m sprint to 102. I think it is safe to say that nobody will have come up with the same route.

I set out with the intention of simply doing a level at a time and working from the bottom to the top. This turned out to be a rather naive plan as it became apparent that getting between levels was not trivial. Stairs and elevators were helpfully marked with brown and blue arrows (brown for down to the earth, blue for up to the sky), but they weren't always where you wanted, and some were blocked off by building work. Just working out where the various bits of map joined together proved quite a challenge, not helped when you found out that level P4 in Car Park C was above Level P5 in Car Park A for instance. Controls were distributed across three terrain types: indoor shopping centre, outdoor ground level (including a trip to Stratford Underground and Bus Station) and car park roof level. You can see a few more photos here.

My GPS watch ended up showing 5.12km in 30.53, although it clearly struggled quite a lot with the indoor bits, and my route choice was far from ideal. Most people seem to agree that getting them all involved something around 5km, which for an area little more than 500m by 400m (by about 30m) is quite impressive. The results show that 39 people managed to get all the controls in the 45 minute time limit, plus quite a few who thought they had only to find they had missed one or two (or three or four...). James, Peter and Helen went round together and managed to get them all in 37:29 although this was apparently helped by having two maps so they could take it in turns to plan ahead and navigate.

A great day out, and one which will hopefully be repeated (and extended) later.

OpenOrienteeringMap from Start to Finish

Fancy putting on an orienteering event anywhere in the world but don't have a map? Then you've never heard of OpenOrienteeringMap. This amazing concept allows you to generate an orienteering map of just about anywhere based on OpenStreetMap, which describes itself as "a free editable map of the whole world". What this means is that thousands of people have been out and mapped everything they can find to create an on-line map. This has the huge benefit that it is open data, licensed under a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY-SA). Subject to certain conditions it is therefore essentially free to use as source data for other maps.

Ollie O'Brien, the man behind YepSport and the mapper for the London City Race amongst other things, has developed OpenOrienteeringMap that now allows you to generate an orienteering map based on OSM. This has been used by SLOW for their monthly street-O events around London. Last night I put on a Street-O in St Albans as part of the HH Summer Series to find out what was involved in staging a race like this.

First step as ever was to select an area. The north-east corner of St Albans is an area known as Jersey Farm. This has some complex housing estates joined by a network of paths which seemed just about right for a Street-O. To make life easy I decided on a 45 minute score event. So let's see what an OOM map of Jersey Farm looks like.

1) Go to http://oobrien.com/oom/. The default view shows Docklands. You can enter a postcode to go directly to somewhere in the UK, or use the zoom facilities to move to wherever you want to use for your map.

2) The default values of the various options are OK to start with. You have a choice between "Street-O Map" or "Pseud-O Map". The Street-O map is black and white and only shows features such as roads, paths, railways, rivers and large buildings. The Pseud-O map attempts to reproduce a standard orienteering map using the ISOM map specification. To me this looks much nicer, but for a street event it really isn't needed, and it's simpler to stick with the black and white version.

3) Once you have moved to the area you need then you can generate the map. Click on the "Create a map" button. This brings up the Map Builder window. You can then select the paper size, map scale and map type. There is also a check box labelled "Include controls". If you leave this box checked then you can add start, finish and controls to the map when you generate it. For my event I wanted to use OCAD for the course planning so I cleared the check box.

4) You then need to left click on the map to mark the centre of your map. This brings up a brown rectangle showing the exact size of your map. You can move this around as necessary by left clicking again, or by selecting a different scale, page size or orientation. For Jersey Farm I went for a 1:10,000 map. Once you have the correct area click OK, and then add a map title if needed, and click OK again.

5) You will now get the message "Creat PDF". Click the button labelled "Go!" and you will get your very own map in PDF format. This is named oom.pdf by default, so it is safest to rename it straight away and save it on your computer. You may well end up generating several versions of the map during the planning process so you need to make sure you are using the correct one.

Now to plan the course. To make life easy you don't want to have to put out controls so you need to find some other way of proving people have visited the correct sites. SLOW use questions about something in the middle of the circle ("what is the name of the pub" and even "what sort of elephant is this" for example) . For me this is too complicated, since it makes life difficult for the planner to create the questions in the first place, and it is annoying as a competitor having to stop to write down long answers or hunt around for obscure answers. I therefore went for something simpler. Jersey Farm is covered in green telephone connection boxes, most of which have a nice painted number such as AL062 20. Getting runners to write down the last two digits seemed the best idea. A quick run around the area and I had found about 50 possible control sites. I still had a few parts of the map with no controls, but a quick hunt around on Google StreetView helped find a few more. It also raised hopes a few times when I spotted a fuzzy green shape in the distance only to find it was a green recycling bin. It turned out that runners at the event had exactly the same problem. The photos aren't quite good enough to read the labels so I had to do another run round to check them. In the end I went for 55 controls. This was probably a little over the top, but it does give runners something to think about.

The event does of course rely on the quality of the OSM base map. In general it was pretty good, but whilst checking sites I did notice several things that needed changing or adding. The great thing about OSM is that you can always make the changes yourself. That isn't really what this is meant to be about, but for those who are interested I used JOSM to edit the map and add the odd extra road, several missing paths and some parks.

I wanted to use OCAD to generate the course. This won't accept PDF files as a background map so I first converted the PDF file to a JPG using GIMP. You can then use the standard OCAD course planning features. This allowed me to add the rules, a set of boxes for answers plus some extra logos. You can always use the built-in OOM function to add start, finish and controls if you don't have OCAD.

And so to the evening of the event. With no controls to put out it was simply a case of turning up at the start with a pen, clipboard and watch and setting people off. I put the start and finish at a green box so that people could see exactly what they were looking for before they started. Everybody got at least 19 controls, with the winner managing 42 in the 45 minutes available. You can see what routes some of the runners took on the HH RouteGadget site. The comments were all very positive, no doubt helped by the good weather and the interesting nature of the terrain. As ever there was much discussion about the map. The main issue was one I was already aware of from some of the SLOW events: open areas such as parks and fields do not show up. You can therefore end up staring at a large open space in front of you and wondering quite where you would come out if you ran across it, and whether you'll get stuck behind an uncrossable fence before you reach the road or path you want to be on. There's no easy answer to this, but it is generally fairly obvious once you get to the particular location. Using the full-colour Pseud-O map would help, and several people commented that they would prefer it.

Overall this event confirmed that it is perfectly possible to hold an event based on OOM. Jersey Farm itself turned out to be perfect, with surprisingly little traffic. Next time all I really need to do is move the start and finish and we could use pretty much the same set of controls. And then there's other bits of St Albans, and Mike said that Harpenden looks possible, and I've always wanted to do something in Hatfield, and then we could try Shenley or Welwyn or even bits of Watford. Looks like the Hertfordshire Street-O League may not be far away.

Orienteering meets art in Trafalgar Square

On Friday September 11th 2009 Adrian had his hour of fame on top of the 1.7m (wide) x 4.4m (long) x 8m (high) fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley's One&Other project. This provides a chance for 2400 people (one an hour for 100 days) to occupy the fourth plinth and do whatever they want. Brooner came up with the great publicity angle that this could be the world's smallest orienteering event. Around 20 other orienteers and even a few members of the public took the chance to run in the first orienteering event to be held in Trafalgar Square.

The whole thing was broadcast live on the internet, as indeed all 2400 hours of the project will be. Looking at the coverage afterwards it may have been a bit difficult to work out what was happening at the time, and even if you were there it wasn't immediately obvious. Adrian was so far above us that it was quite hard to communicate, especially over the noise of the fountains. The theory was that he would run a course on the plinth and then someone would run the equivalent course in the square. It soon became obvious that this was a bit difficult to synchronise so it turned into more of a straight relay.

The extra complication was that each course would outline a letter and everything would be recorded on a GPS watch that was passed from runner to runner, and if we got everything right then we would spell out a message. Alan Leakey was given the job of official starter and a set of maps with courses labelled O, N, E, &, T, H, R, P, L, I and G. His job was then to hand these out in the right order to spell the message. Orienteers from London Orientering Klubb, South London Orienteers, Southdowns Orienteers, Hertfordshire Orienteering Club, Chigwell Orienteering Club, Havering and South Essex Orienteering Club, Saxons Orienteering Club, South Midlands Orienteering Club and possibly a couple of clubs I didn't spot took part. The South Midlands runner was Roger Williams, who had already had his own hour on the plinth a few days earlier.

Discussions with Adrian before the event had concluded we had a chance of managing "ONE & OTHER PLINTH O" in the one hour available, but the unofficial target was to try to manage "ONE & OTHER PLINTH ORIENTEERING". As we came towards the end of the hour we had got to the T in orienteering, but Alan was desperate to finish off. The bright yellow cherry picker drove up to get Adrian down and replace him with the next plinther, but we relocated the start and finish a few metres and continued around it. I spotted that we could stop at "ORIENTEER" and that would still make sense, and even provide a better reference to the person who had started all this off in the first place. And so at just past 14.00 I set off on the final R, telling each control holder as I passed that we had finished. In total we had run 24 courses covering 8.56 kilometres in 52:47.

After the event it was simply a matter of downloading the GPS track and extracting the message. The good news was that we had a full trace from the whole race. The bad news was that my vague idea of doing something in Routegadget to extract the letters didn't really work. After some experimentation the final method turned out to involve quite a complicated process as follows:

1) Read GPS trace from Garmin Forerunner 205 using SportTracks and create a GPX file for each letter.

2) Import each GPX file into QuickRoute and use this to create a JPG image showing the letter. QuickRoute had the nice extra that allows the colour at any point to indicate how fast you are running. Thus green sections show bits where people were moving fast, whilst red is slow.

3) Use IrfanView to do a batch conversion of the JPG files. This provided an easy way to crop and resize all 24 letters without doing it painfully one at a time.

4) Create a 9 by 3 Word table and import the JPG letters into this for final printing.

And so as a contribution to the art created in association with this project we come to the final result, as shown below.

The start and finish are at the bottom left of each letter, and this means courses have to be planned so they don't go through this point. That explains why the E is backwards, the T is on its side and the L is upside down.

A few related links:

• Trafalgar Square map and courses.
• Maprunner photos.
• Photos by Ali Hooper who ran the first letter O.
  
• Maprunner video.
• Adrian's blog.
• Photos by Roger Williams.
  

Tower, 52m, northern foot

Any suggestions where this might be? I guess it's not really that difficult to work out that it is Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Tomorrow the general public will be getting the chance to orienteer around the square when Adrian Bailey spends an hour on the fourth plinth as part of the One & Other project. Helen and I have been helping to set things up so I am mapper and planner and Helen is organiser for what promises to be an interesting experience. We're still not quite sure exactly what will happen, but we have maps, control flags and SI kit so it should look like a proper race. Brooner has found an interesting publicity angle, claiming it to be the World's smallest orientering event.

You can get a sneak-preview of the map in Routegadget.

If you can't be there, don't miss the live web broadcast from 13.00 to 14.00 BST.

And that should provide a perfect warm-up for the 2009 London City Race on Saturday.

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?