The MTBO Athlete Commission created a questionnaire about several questions of MTBO:
http://www.michigigon.at/athlete_commission/questionnaire0712.doc

If you want to help us to improve MTBO please fill it in and send it back to me. The answers will appear in blue so that I can find them easier. I will collect the answers, draw some conclusions out of them and forward the wishes of the MTBO-community to the IOF and hope that they will not ignore us. At 19.1.08 there is the IOF-council meeting at which I will present the results. Therefore it would be good if I get the answered questionnaires back until 6.1.08.

Michi Gigon
gigonwien@utanet.at

One more thing came to my mind in connection with the questionnaire, and perhaps it would be fit to this forum to discuss it!
We have got a very useful tool in our hand since we use SI to handle protested control posts, but we usually do not use it. Why? If there is a disputed and protested control post or leg, and the protestation was accepted, the most simple, and less grievous way would be to delete from the result only the affected segment of the course! Are the rules allow it? If yes, why don’t we use it?

Hi.
No, there is nothing in the rules that specifically tells the organizers how to deal with a e.g. missplaced control.

Your suggestion could have been a solution to the missplaced control at EOC in Poland 2006 - Men's middle distance. Nevertheless I personaly would have cancelled the race, instead of cutting the 2 adjacent times (before and after the missplaced control) from each riders total time. The reason I would have done this is that many riders who could not find the control simply gave up or was seriously demotivated - causing a poor effort in the rest of the course.  

I still can't believe why the jury chose not to cancel this race but declared the results for official.

Of course it would have been a pity to not have an EOC champion. In France they made up an new middle distance in the Foot-O World Cup 2006, after the the race was cancelled due to bad weather halfway through. Thats impressing!

I guess this is something that should be regulated for all branches of orienteering (foot-o, MTBO, Ski-O) in the same way.  Up to now there don´t seem to be any rules about it and different countries handle it in different ways:

At the WRE in Austria this year there was a control in the wrong place. The French put in a protest and expected just the wrong control (+the one after) to be taken out of the ranking as they seem to be used to at home. But the Austrian Jury decided that this had never been done before in Austria and there is nothing in the rulebook about it. So they did as they normally would after a protest: If there is something wrong, the whole race for the affected category is cancelled and not just a control or 2.

Michi

My opinion is that during a course there are a lot of occasion to demotivate us. If we can not get ahead of these things, we will seldom succesful. If this rule would be normally applied, everyone could know there is a possibility to handle of missing control and there is reason to fight during the rest of the course.

Now there has been a clear decision about that by the IOF-Rules-Commission at the IOF-Joint Meeting yesterday. By a coincidence they have discussed this problem before we asked them and told the MTBO-Commission following:

If there are problems with wrong or missing controls or anything else it is not possible to take one or two controls out of the race result. Only whole races shall be ranked.

This (in different words) will also appear in the new rules (for all disciplines, not just for MTBO) which will most probably be valid from 1.5.2008 as everything has to be approved by the IOF-Council which will meet in April.

I will soon give you some more information what was going on at the meeting.

Michi

I would really be interested why this was considered to be the most adequate solution. Anna's proposal seemed to be a bit more just to me.

However, it would be unique to see at least an entire event to be canceled, because for me it seems that protest never works: the organizers admit the mistake but practically all the results stay as they are (see Middle d. MTB EOC 2006, Poland).

I´m also not so happy with this solution, annas proposal would be the better way. think about how often it happened that controls were taken or missplaced by hikers.

I think a good decission has been made.

Yes you should allways know where you are on the map an can decide that you at the right place but the control is missing. But finally I agree with the cancellation of the whole race. It should be possible for organisers to guaranty the right placements of the controls what else are the most important tasks of organisers.
If there are changes during race like stolen or replaced control it becomes unfair anyway.

Here is the official reason for this decision:

http://www.michigigon.at/athlete_commission/take_controls_out.jpg