Our first MTBO weekend of the season 2022 was in Hungary at the World Ranking Event in Soly near the Balaton lake. Nicely organised competition and for us very succesful weekend. But what’s the ranking anyway? What is it for? And how does it work? Let us explain it a bit.
IOF world ranking scheme rules sheet:
https://onedrive.live.com/embed?resid=663580750D0C0BCE!47383&authkey=!APAPVsf8O2TJ5NA&em=2&wdHideHeaders=True&wdDownloadButton=False&fbclid=IwAR2go4sKeX9Ao22m6qyZf-z29hRsuH3KTiWON00phOnsMELXzWJwt-oukIA
IOF videos explaining the ranking system fully:
We are here. Exactly 10 days ago we shut the door of our last road cycling camp in Portugal. And since then we are traveling from Portugal to Hungary for the first MTBO World Ranking Event in Veszprém…Soly, Soly is easier.
During the journey, we made some map trainings to get into orienteering shape which was awesome. We did some trainings in Spain, we’ve made it to the French cup for the long-distance and now we are in Hungary and we are the first ones here.
And it’s raining a bit and today is prolog and tomorrow it will be middle distance and on Sunday it will be long distance. We’ve waited for the worst rain and now we can go out. Perfect. Ok, this was a little bit too much. I’m soaked wet.
A storm is going on out there. So it was a little bit scary in the forest and Needy’s here. Hurrah! Not a very pleasant ride but I’m glad we are home. Hopefully tomorrow it will be better. How was it? Pretty fun. Nah, it was really fun, I got lost a few times but…
It was fine! By the way, we are invited by Sandor to have some food with them so we should just change and join them. And I will put the bikes inside. See ya! Maybe you’re wondering as I was, what the heck is the world ranking for.
Basically it’s there to compare riders all over the world and it’s used to allocate riders into starting groups at World Champs, European Champs or World Cups. Everyone who finishes a WRE race in an elite cathegory gets some points for it. I’ll explain how the points work later.
There are usually around 20 WRE races each year all over the world. But mostly in Europe. But only the 4 best ones over the last 12 months count. Most of the Czech team is participating and these are our elections for the European Champs.
For me, it doesn’t change much because I am already selected, but most of the team is still not known for Lithuania. That’s a performance! Saturday belonged to the middle distance. Men elite had a 14.5 Km long course with 18 controls.
One of the interesting route choices was right between the first and the second control. The fastest time here 3:17 had Kryštof Bogar. The second one with +5 seconds was Needy. They both took the yellow choice. The blue one was +20 seconds and the red choice was the slowest one +40 seconds.
Women elite was 12.8 Km long with 16 controls. An interesting choice was one of the longer legs between controls number 13 and 14. And it mostly helped me. I took the trail path with the dot ending which earned me 38 seconds.
The second one at that leg was Martina Tichovská she took the safer red choice as most of the girls did. In Hungary riding off track is allowed. It’s mostly handy in the open and semi-open areas like this. In the forests, it’s usually not the fastest option.
Also, off-track controls are allowed so in some parts it’s a little bit more similar to foot orienteering. And control descriptions would be handy. Thank you. Sunday’s long-distance was in the same area as the middle distance so we could use some knowledge about the terrain from the previous race.
Elite categories got 3 maps at the start and the first one was used twice At the beginning and the ending of the race so there were 3 map changes during the race. The courses were very nicely set and even though we knew the area and some controls
From the previous race, there were some difficult route choices to make. Men elite had a 29.1 Km long course with 25 controls. Women elite had a 23.8 Km long course with 22 controls. Open land areas were used a lot and because it was a windy day it was also a very tough race.
Having 3 maps is a quite rare situation and changing the maps without losing the other two is a little bit difficult. When you don’t want to lose seconds by stopping for it. Wow. It was exhausting. Yes, I took the same one. This could have been fine.
I wanted to go before the thicket but I went behind it. What’s your time? 3:45 You had to ride like a maniac. But you are faster everywhere. I rode around that hill. And then on the path. Tobias caught me there. There was some thicket and I didn’t know if it is it.
I was probably eating there and I didn’t see it. It wasn’t visible from that path. I shorten it here and that straight to the control. I took it around and along with these dots. Nice travel home. And now something about the world ranking system.
Valerie got her third and fourth WRE points which moved her from 95. spot to 46. Which is great. In my case, it didn’t help me at all because my points from the world championships and world cup from the previous year were more like 100 points bigger. Why so?
And why there is even a point difference between my victory in the middle and the long-distance? Even though there were almost the same people? The World Ranking system is more or less the same for all the orienteering sports and it’s pretty complicated. The point gain is based on time, not the position.
And it reflects the quality of the field as well as the physical and technical difficulty of the course. It works with 2 inputs. Each competitor’s world ranking score and his or her time in the race. It’s all being calculated from the midpoint using the means and standar deviations of times
And all the competitor’s world ranking scores. The average time should get the average amount of points, as well as the ones standard deviation far from the average, should get the appropriate points. The rest is linear. Ten there are weights. Which reflect the importance of race.
For World Championships and World Cups, there is a set point gain for the winner. So all the points will be multiplied by the apropriet coefficient. To meet the winner’s point gain. In the case of regional championships and other world ranking events, the points gained
By the winner have some upper and lower limits. If they are within this criteria nothing changes if not all the points will be scaled up or down. There are few what-ifs in the process but this is generally it.
If you want to understand the world ranking scheme perfectly there are 3 videos from the IOF about it. As well as World Ranking scheme rules published on the IOF website. We’ll put the links in the description. Based on this knowledge I recalculated my points from the WRE in Hungary.
And the reason for the point difference between my victory on the middle distance and the long distance was because of slightly higher starting field quality and a bit less technically/physicall demanding course. Overall we are very glad we’ve made it here. also, the results are very satisfying for both of us.
Needy won both of the races and I was the second one in the overall results. Honestly, I couldn’t even imagine this last year. After the competition, we took a quick dip in the still pretty cold Balaton lake and couldn’t leave without Lángos.
The Czech national team stayed there for two more days for a training camp. Which we joined. There were three more trainings focused on mapping skills. So this was our beginning of the season in Hungary. The next big races (international ones) are the European Championships in Lithuania in the second half of May.
See you there!