Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Friday, August 12, 2005 Stopping followingAfter yesterday's world championships long distance race, following is an obvious topic. Here are a few thoughts about following.1. You can't eliminate following from orienteering. You also can't elimnate fraud, crime, war, or any number of bad things. But you can put in controls that make it harder to follow and easier to catch (and punish) people who follow. 2. The easiest way to get rid of the problem is to "legalize" following. Orienteering could always be a mass start race where anyone can follow anyone else. The first person to cross the line wins. It'd be exciting to watch. It'd be fair. Making following an accepted part of the sport is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But, it'd be a big change in the nature of the sport and, in my opinion, a mistake. 3. Orienteering relies on protests to identify and address following. Someone might follow another orienteer around the course, but if a competitor or team leader doesn't protest, everyone just ignores it (recall the North Americans in Ohio as an example). But, orienteering doesn't have to rely on protests to identify problems. At a WOC you could assign someone the job of identifying probable following and then taking a look at each specific case. Studying splits lets you spot probably following quickly and easily. If that happened, you'd have a lot of possible following incidents identified and looked at. That alone might reduce the amount of following in the sport. 4. The best control to prevent following is individual starts with reasonable start intervals. What are reasonable start intervals? It depends on the terrain, the course setting and the level of competition. I think a strong case can be made that two minutes was too small a start interval for the long distance races at the WOC. 5. When auditors look at controls to prevent fraud, we talk about the "control environment." Control environment involves a bunch of things, but you can boil it down to something like the organization's (business or government or whatever) culture. Some organizations have a strong control environment -- everyone knows what is expected; what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. In some places bribes and kick backs are common business practices. In some places bribes and kick backs are clearly unacceptable. An orienteering "control environment" that frowns on following won't prevent people from following; but it'd probably reduce the amount of following that goes on. posted by Michael | 7:42 PM 
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