Report

Organiser's comments:

We hope you enjoyed our urban event on a completely new map of Bedford.

It was glorious June morning, with perfect conditions for urban orienteering. The combination of Bob's map and Richard's courses gave everyone a tricky challenge through a variety of environments.

Putting on an event like this involves a lot of work behind the scenes, so I would like to thank everyone at WAOC, SMOC and beyond who helped to make it happen.

Sometimes things are outside our control, so I would like to apologise for any 'inconvenience' caused by the broken toilet. However, the memory of the collective stunned gasp when the cavalry rode into the site will live with me for a while. Thanks to Luke at LKS for amazing service.

Unfortunately, no day can be perfect... runners found one small error in the map; an unmapped uncrossable fence between 6 and 7 on Course 2.

This was on a reasonable route for this leg, and we believe the resulting course correction caused significant impact to the affected competitors (to the extent that it altered overall placings). We have therefore made the difficult decision to void that leg; we believe this is the fairest resolution for all competitors on this course. Further explanation of the decision can be found below.

Following on from that technical point, I'd like to also thank Mike as Controller for supporting the event with wisdom and humour.

We attracted around 200 entries from all over the country (and even a couple of other countries!), and it seemed that everyone had a good time.

I hope that you enjoyed your day/weekend in our part of the world, and we look forward to seeing you again.

On that note, WAOC would like to invite you to our Yaxley Urban event on 1^st September, and also point out that we will be restarting Park-O from 26^th October.

Jon Ward (WAOC)

Further explanation of voided leg

A number of conditions have to be satisfied for voiding a leg to be the right thing to do. The Organiser in consultation with the Controller believes they were met:

• Only one leg on one course was affected. The leg was a small proportion of the course (~3%) so basing ranking points, etc. on the remaining 97% is representative of overall performance.
• There was a genuine map error; a missing uncrossable fence 3m long and 1.8m high, and we apologise for that.
• Taking the blocked route choice - had it been open - would have been ~231m as opposed to ~235m so times would have been within 1-2s.
• The 2 competitors who are known to have had the issue had markedly slower times than on adjacent legs; they were among the top 4 finishers overall but 20-25s slower than their peers on the affected leg. 3 others were also outliers, so possibly affected. Voiding the leg results in a position swap in 4 out of the 5 cases.
• A large majority of runners were ranked very similarly on that leg to their ranking on adjacent legs. Voiding the leg results in no position swaps between unaffected runners.

Planner’s Comments:

First, thank you all for coming and for all the very positive comments. It was a great turn out on a nice day, and everybody seemed to enjoy their courses. It was particularly gratifying to see a number of ‘Urban legends’ orienteering around courses I had planned. As you know by now, Bedford is very flat and very fast. Course 1 was right at the maximum allowed at 10.1km (actually a 100m over this!). I tried to get you to the more interesting parts of the area, and to introduce as many challenges as the map and course lengths allowed: long/short leg transitions; longer urban route choices; route choices over bridges; and changes of level. It certainly seemed that some people were caught out in the transition from simpler, fast running into the more complex sections, as I had planned. Courses took you to interesting parts of the town, including Council offices, the Castle, Russell Park, the embankment of the Great Ouse, the town centre, as well as different housing areas. The Council would not allow any controls in the ground in the Castle area, limiting what I could do, but I hope you enjoyed running around it.

After the club was unable to get permission to use some other venues, Bedford Council offered the use of their field as an alternative. In the end, it made for a great Assembly and Start set-up. The riverbank area was such that if anyone did try to wander off through the Start to find the Finish beforehand, they would have been be able to see a number of controls!

The map was brand new, and I am grateful for the input of a number of people, with some initial drawing and survey by Steve Hardy (SMOC), extensive survey and drawing by Bob Hill (WAOC), and some final tidying by Caroline Louth (WAOC). Apologies for the missing uncrossable fence that affected two runners on Course 2.

A couple of people mentioned that they felt Course 4 was a little too short. One of them didn’t visit all of their controls though! But seriously… As some of you will know, a consequence of the Rules Group’s tidying up of BO’s Rules of Orienteering (effective 1 January 2024) is that all courses, including Sprints and Urbans, must now unambiguously be advertised as the ‘shortest route which a competitor could reasonably possibly take’ (Rule 17.5; Appendix B, 11.5.4). You can’t get away with ‘it’s an urban, so you might run up to 50% further’ any longer. As a number of fellow Planners have been remarking, this causes much more work for the Planner if they only have access to Purple Pen. Another consequence though, is that this highlights an issue with the Course table for Urbans (Appendix B, 11.6). Course 4 is 0.50 of Course 1, so the longest the Course can be is actually 5km. The Shortest Optimal Route for Course 4 at Bedford was 4.8km. I should have got another 200m out of it, but it wouldn’t have made a massive difference to the fastest times. We may need to rethink our expectations or guidelines, or introduce winning times, as the top speeds at MUV and MSV in flat areas are increasingly impressive.

Whoever scheduled a back-to-back Double Sprint in Milton Keynes followed by a Bedford Urban wasn’t thinking of the limitations of EAOA’s regional kit stock. So, thank you ever so much to Simon and the North London SI Consortium for allowing us to loan their gripples.

A huge thank you to my control collectors, Erik, Hania, Jason, Stephen, Gary and Hana, who helped make a big chore a lot easier.

Finally, a massive thank you to Jon (Organiser) and Mike (Controller) for being great and supportive fellow officials.

Richard Powell (WAOC)