okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Friday, June 18, 2004
Focus on the sprint
The first sprint WOC was in 2001. Sprint O' has really only been around as a more-or-less serious event for a few years. I guess it started to be treated as a serious O' discipline with the beginning of the Park World Tour. As far as I can tell, the first PWT season was in 1996.
So, sprint O' is a relatively new discipline.
I don't know much about sprint O', but I'm interested in learning. One of the many "projects" I have in mind is to study sprint O' course setting. I'd like to have a sense of what sprint O' tests. I've got some ideas about how to think systematically about course setting and I think I'd learn something if I took a careful look at a bunch of sprint O' courses.
Another part of my this "project" (or maybe a separate project?) would be to poke around the various elite O' pages and see what people like Lowegren, Valstad and Engstrand have to say about sprint O'.
Even without much study, one thing that is clear is that sprint O' places a special demand on looking at the course and figuring out where to go. At the 2003 WOC, people had trouble when they ran to the wrong control (4 to 6 instead of 4 to 5, or something like that). You can get an idea of how difficult it might be to figure out where to go next by looking at Fredrik Lowegren's maps from the final race of the Stockholm City Cup. Here is part I and here is part II.
