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I watched two of the races (the one above and one of the finals) and counted how often each of the three commentators was talking. The commentators were: Rickard Ekman (a sports journalist), Anders Garderud (Olympic gold medalist and orienteer who runs for IFK Lidingo), and Helena Jansson (WOC gold medalist orienteer). For the most part, Ekman described what was going on. He was the play-by-play. Garderud and Jansson provided "color commentary." Ekman spoke the most. I didn't time each commentator. Instead, I counted how often they were leading the commentary. Ekman had the lead 27 times. Garderud was leading 18 times. Jansson was leading 18 times.

People frequently criticize the knock out sprint format (mass start, no forking, first 2 finishers qualify for the next round) for being nothing but a group running around together. That's a valid criticism, but it is a bit of an over simplification. In the 8 minute race shown in the video, there are a couple of legs where people take different routes. So, there is some splitting up.

SVT commented that the format itself was interesting and that the production was OK, with some room for improvement (which we know). Last week-end the European Team Championships in Track & Field was held in Stockholm and the number of viewers for orienteering was in parity with the number of viewers for that event, which is a good number.

Also, the knockout sprint from Gothenburg was sent on Finnish TV (a 1 hour taped show sent at 10 PM Finnish Time) and had an average of 170 000 viewers (with a max of 200 000)! (Note, there are appr 40 000 members in the Finnish O Federation, so obviously around 150 000 "non-orienteers" found the production understandable and interesting.

Comments:

:-P It wasn't just the same number of spectators, it was most likely the SAME spectators, because in the end it was just a Track&Field(with map).

1) The later winner did not read much map neither in Quarter- nor Semifinal.
2) The later winner waited until the third last control and even from there his tactics was 'taking the same route as Hubmann'.

http://o-zeugs.blogspot.com/2011/06/nort-2011-knockout-sprint-goteborg-ii.html

This is not his fault to win that way. It is the settings fault. The combination of 'no routechoices' and 'even routechoices' with a 500m run-in in my opinion is no good direction (->3000m Urban Steeple) (Even some runners like Merz, Bortnik, Eliasson or Bilstam could not believe, that it had nothing to do with orienteering) (Why did it have to be in Göteborg? - I saw about 200 Spectators and GPS does obviously not work in a citys center).

So all in all. To make this TV format really unique there should be a form reintroducing orienteering in it, for example something like this: http://o-zeugs.blogspot.com/2011/02/woc-2014-langdistanz-mit-massenstart.html (btw. nice phrase! Like Biathlon decided to reintroduce shooting :-)

# posted by

M.Lerjen : 3:04 AM

# posted by

ibm123str : 12:57 AM

Watching the Swedish TV Orienteering Coverage