Protest = The Map

The results of a Swedish elite race were thrown out because the quality of the map was unacceptable. The protest was essentially that the map had specific problems that affected results because, for example, two routes that looked equivalent weren't.

You can see the map at Mats Troeng's page (he was one of the three who protested). If you can read Swedish, a report and the protest are available at the SOFT web page.

Troeng wrote a bit about it in the discussion on Alternativet. I'll translate (roughly) some of what he wrote:

The reason we made the protest was mainly to show that we can't accept that an elite-series race is held on a map with such poor quality. I think you had to be there to understand how schematic the map was. In addition, when roughly half of the runners go through a tunnel that isn't drawn on the map and should, therefore, be disqualified under the sprint rules, we think - and many agree - that the competition needs to be thrown out.

It is never fun, but sometimes you have to be the critic. The more significant intent of our protest isn't to criticize the organizers or take away credit from the runners who finished at the top (it would have been the same on the top even with a correct map). The intent was to start a discussion about how to improve the quality of Swedish orienteering events and keep this problem from happening again....


A couple of years ago this same sort of event quality discussion was going on at Attackpoint (it is the sort of topic that comes up every year or so). I wrote a few of my thoughts.

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