Will Gardner on the run-in

The JK Sprint Champions are Will Gardner and Megan Carter-Davies. Both kindly shared their immediate thoughts - post-race interviews on Twitter.

Official results

The races were at Aldershot "Home of The British Army", which was a great venue and looking particularly lovely in the warm sunshine. Nearly all of each course was in the secure garrison area, with fast running mostly on tarmac or flagstones. There are many buildings, fences, and hedges, and interesting and fair courses weaving in and out set many short route choice decisions.

But, and this is a rather significant "but", the timing system fell short, both in regard to displaying the information to commentary and the audience, and runners being confident about reliably recording which controls were visited

Provisional results may be found at https://race-results.info/live/1660/class.pdf or at https://race-results.info/live/1660/

We are nervous about the timing system for the rest of the weekend.

Men

1. Will Gardner
2. Alasdair McLeod
3. Murray Strain

Women

1. Megan Carter-Davies
2. Cecilie Andersen
3. Lizzie Ingham

These athletes can be particularly proud and satisfied with their top three positions in what were very competitive races. For Will it is a first individual JK medal as a senior. For Megan it is the title successfully defended.

Maps may be seen at https://twitter.com/UKEliteOLeague/status/1119251817282646017

The problem or problems with the EMITag timing system are of course a big talking point.

Clearly there was and is a great deal of hard work going on, and there must be some very disappointed volunteers.

1. Runners on the World Ranking Event courses, numbers 1 and 2, were given two EMITags - this is usual.
2. Alasdair McLeod, who was second on M21E, was re-instated after initial disqualification as although his primary tag had a control missing, his second tag was complete.
3. Up until at least Saturday morning 8am Chris Smithard appears as second in the results on the web, probably incorrectly re-instated after initial disqualification. Indeed the now available splits show no split for No 9.
4. We know of a course 2 runner who thinks they visited all controls but both tags have missing sequences and so they are disqualified.
5. There seem to be many runners on other courses who believe they have been unfairly disqualified for missing controls.
6. We saw many runners who looked at their tags after punching the final control only to stop and turn back - this control was quite close to the penultimate control.
7. The Commentary team had none of the information that was expected from the results system: pre-warnings, live updates etc.
8. The Results service was giving no or slow service all day.
9. The Results service is somewhat naive compared to most orienteers' expectations e.g. it is not handling firstnames longer than 7 characters ("Alasdai") or surnames longer than 9 ("Carter-Da") and splits were posted late.

Update (1st May): Rob Lines captured the M/W20 Sprint Podium the next day: very well done. We think all have been invited to join the GB Junior World Champs Team. JWOC Selection Announcement.