MFR Sprints

A highlight of the summer season

WORDS PATRICK JAFFE

A highlight of the summer season was the debut of Melbourne Forest Racers’ sprint series, held with an innovative format on some iconic central Melbourne areas. Victorians were keen to be back sprint orienteering after the extended 2020 lockdowns, and they turned up in droves for this series, with an average of over 100 participants per event. The four maps had only previously been used for club training sessions and participants loved the ‘mini-mass start’ format, which gave orienteers of all ages a taste of knock-out sprint orienteering. The new format was designed to fit around social distancing requirements but ended up being a big hit with participants. Competitors were allocated into groups of 8-10 people, who started together in a mass start. For simplicity, there was just the one course, although we introduced a range of forking methods to split the mass-start runners up. This included multiple butterfly loops as well as a ‘mini-scatter’. The latter course setting technique involved participants having to collect three out of the first five controls, in any order. This format ended up being highly successful, with the groups of 8-10 tending to split up immediately, which of course led to plenty of post-event analysis.

We made use of a number of other small innovations, which helped to simplify the organisation and enhance the experience of these low-key events. A single course was offered each week, of approximately 3km, which suited orienteers of all ages. The mini-mass starts helped us get through starters nice and quickly, and results were done through the SI Droid tablet app which greatly reduced the workload for the organisers. Many thanks to Ian Dodd who helped program people’s details into their SI sticks, which sped things even more.

The low-key nature of the events meant we could make the courses more interesting by marking extra impassable barriers on the map. While these weren’t actually fenced off in reality, an honour system proved effective, and people enjoyed the challenge of the interesting route choice legs that we created around these fake barriers. Given it was a summer event, we also brought icy poles for every finisher which proved very popular!

Things kicked off at the beautiful Carlton Gardens, where Mason Arthur set a rapid-fast course that took us looping through the maze of garden beds, with some longer route choice legs around the iconic Royal Exhibition Building and Melbourne Museum. The following week’s event was at Commonwealth Village in Parkville, a residential area used as the Athletes’ Village for the 2006 Games. Patrick Jaffe’s courses made use of the mini-scatter format for the first time, which tested people right from the start. Event 3 was at Princes Park, with Jensen Key as course setter. There was plenty of variety at this event: detailed cobbled laneways, Princes Hill Primary School and the stunning Princes Park itself, including Ikon Park, Carlton Football Club’s home ground.

We had to relocate our final event at short notice, so we returned to the same event arena in Carlton Gardens, but this time made use of the laneways to the north of the park. Jensen’s brother Aston set an excellent course for this event, which included plenty of fake fences and a labyrinth section, created by taping gaps between trees near the finish. The other memorable aspect of this event was the start of the courses, which involved turning immediately down an alleyway only about 50cm wide, much to everyone’s surprise as they reached the start triangle.

MFR Sprints 2021 were a lot of fun and it felt great to be back orienteering again on some high quality courses. The innovations were well received and our club learnt a lot about putting on low-key events, which we then applied to the 2022 MFR Sprints series, making it even more suited to newcomers.