okansas.blogspot.com

okansas.blogspot.com
Occassional thoughts about orienteering

Friday, September 17, 2004

Rostrup's miss

Jorgen Rostrup was leading the WOC sprint at the 10th control, just a couple of minutes from the finish. He lost time on the way to 11 and ended up finishing 7th, 17.3 seconds behind the winner.

What happened?

I read a couple of Norwegian news stories that explained Rostrup's miss. He took a bad route. He took a chance when he should have just hung with a Finnish runner. Rostrup's route took him 1:36. Rostrup was 41st of the 45 runners on that leg. The fastest time on the leg was 1:15.

I looked at the routes from seven other runners on the Runoway web page. Rostrup was the only person who took his route. All of the others took one of two fairly similar variations.

The women's race had a similar leg (the same control but a bit different leg). I looked at 14 of the women's routes and none of them approached the control the same way as Rostrup.

Looking at how Rostrup ran the leg I can see why he lost time. He ran much more of the leg in the forest compared to others who spent nearly all of the leg running on trails. He climbed a couple of extra lines. Rostrup's approach to the control was physically tougher and a bit trickier.

Why did he take the wrong route?

I don't know, but I'll speculate. Rostrup didn't prepare for the sprint until he was selected a couple of weeks before the WOC. When he was picked for the WOC sprint, he was quoted in the newspapers as saying he didn't even know the map symbols for sprint maps. Maybe he just didn't have the sprint experience to make the right choice on the 11th leg. Given that every other runner who has marked their routes (to date, at least) took approached the control from the trail above the control it seems reasonable to conclude that the route choice problem wasn't tough.

I wonder if Rostrup would be the sprint world champ if he'd done a bit more preparation over the last year or so (instead of over the last couple of weeks). We'll never know.

One of the stories I read today quoted Rostrup as saying he'd never run another sprint. I hope that isn't true because I think he's a very interesting orienteer and still young enough to win more world championships before he ends his career.

posted by Michael | 5:50 PM

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