okansas.blogspot.com

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Occassional thoughts about orienteering

Thursday, August 07, 2003

Some thoughts about sprint orienteering

One of the things I think is interesting about sprint orienteering is that normal booms can have really big effects on the results. Comparing two runners at the WOC -- Johan Naesman and Martin Terry -- illustrates that.

Johan and Martin both live in the same city, Stockholm, and run for the same club, IFK Lidingo. Johan is 30 and Martin is 27.

Johan and Martin have very different O' records. Johan has won medals in international competition. I think he's won a JWOC. He's one of the best in Sweden; one of the best O' nations. Right now, Johan is ranked 13th in the world according to the IOF. Martin is one of the best from South Africa. He's currently ranked 562nd in the world according to the IOF.

In the sprint WOC, Martin was just 33 seconds behind Johan....because Johan made a couple of booms. Sprint races are so short that a couple of relatively small booms can't be made up, and a couple of small booms represent a big portion of the total race.

Johan was in the lead at the 4th control when he misread the map and started running to 10 instead of 5. He figures it cost him 45 seconds. After that mistake he was just 2 seconds ahead of Martin at the next radio. Johan kept going but made another boom, losing another 30 seconds. He still beat Martin by 33 seconds, so he must have been orienteering a good bit faster than Martin.

I haven't actually looked at the split times and studied the routes. But, I've got to guess that Martin had a fairly consistent run and I'd say he's probably relatively satisfied with his 31st place in the World Champs and just 33 seconds behind Johan.

Assuming Johan's estimates are correct, he boomed 1:15 on a course that took him 14:11. Taking away those two booms would move him to second place. But, you can't take them away. About ten percent of his time was booms.

If it weren't a sprint race, I don't think Martin would really have a chance to be close to Johan even if Johan wasn't having a good run.

posted by Michael | 1:22 PM

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