Cambridge University
Orienteering Club

Cambridge City Race 2011

=A message from the Controller

The race had many areas of out of bounds and uncrossable features. The temptation is always there to ignore them, and sometimes this may happen inadvertently, but there were good reasons for all of them. The co-operation of colleges for future staging of this race is entirely dependent upon adherence to their requirements.

For this reason there were a number of marshals and porters at various points and any reported transgressions will be investigated. If anybody was aware of breaches of access requirements for any reason, please contact us - as has already been the case by some very honest competitors who realised their mistakes.

Thank you

Keith Downing (controller)

=Organisers' Comments

A level B urban race is perhaps not the easiest place to begin your organising career, but very luckily I had two extremely capable colleagues in Andy Straková and Ben “I’ll help but I definitely don’t want to be organiser again” Windsor who made the race possible to bring together. Thank you to Keith, our controller who kept us on the straight and narrow, WAOC for general assistance and loan of their kit, Happy Herts for loan of some extremely important kit and to all our amazing helpers who did some very necessary but very boring jobs very well indeed. We are of course indebted to all those without whom the race could not have occurred. Our thanks go to Anthony French at the City Council, Steve Matthews at the University Sites management, the Cambridge Union Society and St Johns, Trinity, Downing, Clare, Kings, Queens and Pembroke Colleges. Special thanks must go to Clare who let us access their college despite their graduation ceremony clashing with the race!

I know some will have found our strictly worded warnings and shouting marshals a little overbearing, but they really were necessary if we are to be able to use these colleges again. We had to put an awful lot of persuasion in to gain access to the colleges we did get in to, and there are several others who said no outright. If it was marked Out Of Bounds then it means the college specifically asked for it to be so! Thankfully, most of you were very good at keeping out of trouble. Those that weren’t know who you are and, as we look closely at the splits and reports from the marshals & college porters come in, we’re starting to find out too. Thanks to everyone who stuck to the permitted areas and huge respect to those who have contacted us to confess a mistake. Ironically, the biggest problem area wasn’t a college at all but the stream around control 154 on courses 2 and 3. The ISSOM 2007 symbol set does state clearly that streams and watercourses are uncrossable, but we acknowledge this could have been more prominently promoted than it was (a link in the Final Details) given the tempting nature of the leg. Apologies to those who got both muddy and inadvertently disqualified.

Finally, thanks to all of you for coming. We tried to put on the best race we could and we hope you enjoyed your day!

David Maliphant, Ben Windsor and Andy Strakova

=Controller's Comments

Co-ordinating a city race is never easy, but Cambridge is particularly difficult with separate negotiations necessary with each individual college. Even the colleges which did not give an outright ‘no’ could not clearly confirm just what was permissible until the very last possible moment, making Adam’s planning particularly challenging and testing Ben’s diplomatic skills. If you were one of the very few people who felt ‘it doesn’t matter’ about running across forbidden grass, you could have undone all their good work for future years.

Unfortunately we did put temptation to cross uncrossable water in the way to control 154 on course 3. We did review this leg in the summer but then the stream was a foot deeper and much less tempting. Apologies to all who were confused.

Even though the lengthy summer vacation complicated preparations, the organising team pulled everything together to run a very slick race and Adam produced some challenging courses to keep you thinking. It will be interesting to see on Routegadget how you tackled them. Well done to the club for a well run race and making my job so enjoyable.

Keith Downing (SMOC)