LETTERS

The Australian Orienteer welcomes letters. Preference will be given to letters which are concise and which make positive points. The editor reserves the right to edit letters, particularly ones which are longer than 300 words.

Entry Fees for MTBO Championships

I’d like to take up the point of event entry fees raised by the recreational rider in the June’07 edition of The Australian Orienteer. As organiser of this year’s Australian MTBO Championships in Newcastle we are acutely aware of the need to balance the cost of the event with the entry fees. Orienteers have always been somewhat sensitive to high entry fees, but on the whole I think we continue to delude ourselves. The financial reality of, say, the Long course at the Australian MTBO Champs, based on 100 entrants, is: State Levy $8.00 OA Levy $5.70 NPWS area access fee $2.20 Printing $2.00 Mapping $10.00 Event organising $5.00

Total: $32.90

So there we have it. Cost of the event is about $33 per entrant. Risk of the event is all to the club. In this case the area passes to National Parks on 1 July 2007 and we’ve had to negotiate extensively to get access for even this one event – a decision which was made after the mapping was completed. So there’s no chance to recoup mapping costs over a number of years. Something which is all too often happening these days. Further, this budget assumes that the people setting courses and organising will not claim petrol expenses for the 3-hour round trip to the area, let alone - heaven forbid - the Australian Tax Office mileage rate for vehicle travel. So all people involved in the organisation not only donate substantial amounts of their time, they are directly subsidising entry fees by absorbing the cost of travel. So the organising club needs to charge over $40 per entry before it makes as much money as the OANSW. I have no real problem with making a very small profit on an event and one of the nice things about Orienteering is it is almost entirely voluntary. But at a time when the government has cut our budget by about one third, we realistically need to be increasing the State and OA levies. Which in turn will increase entry fees. The simple fact is that Orienteering entry fees remain, in my view, ludicrously low, compared to what we offer and the level of administration and support we like to provide for the sport. Even if we had no mapping costs (all voluntary) we still have a cost per entrant of about $23. Our response for the Australian MTBO Champs is to charge enough to break even. And that will be about $35 per race. If I trot out the old comparison with other MTB national events we see how low Orienteering entry fees are: Scott 24 Hour $120/person, National XC Champs $80, NSW XC Champs $55. Adventure races and 100 km races are normally $100+. In foot-O it’s similar. Fun runs generally cost a lot more than O events and our non-navigation counterparts don’t have map costs. So without making any judgement of whether it’s a good or bad thing, Orienteering is way out of step with the general outdoor event market. I would say; Orienteering, wake up! The principles of budget are really simple. You must spend less than you earn or you go bust. We can do this by either increasing income or reducing expenses. Given that memberships and entries have remained pretty much static for the last 30 years we realistically would have to say that we’re not going to get more income from greater participation in a hurry. Or we can increase entry fees. Reducing expenses means less services, fewer new maps, events closer to the members, etc. The choice is simple.

Paul Darvodelsky

Start Times

I refer to Ian Dodd’s letter in the June 2007 edition ‘Impatient Drivers NOT WELCOME’. This complained about aggressive overtaking on the roads leading to events. I offer no comment on the subject of the road driving problems of overtaking, tailgating, and road hogging except to say that there is a golden rule of driving – if some one wants to go faster than you do, let him. It doesn’t matter whether you are 500 km down the Gibb River track or 500 m from an orienteering event. Ian rightly points out that the ‘offenders’ may have been late for their starts. This begs the question – do we really need nominated or allocated start times for league events? Would participants be in a far more relaxed state of mind without the tyranny of the timetable? Is this a major disincentive to people entering? My suggestion is that we still have nominated times but on selected courses (hopefully all except elites) participants may start at any time subject to the starter’s control/discretion. This may take the form of all latecomers waiting until the end of all nominated starts, or, if the starter can cope, by slot-ins. My guess is that only a small proportion would be late and very few early. I accept that this may not be workable at major events such as Easter 3-Days. This may already be current practice at many events. What matters is how well the message is communicated to participants beforehand so no one has to feel under undue time pressure to get to the event. An alternative is to allocate start times at the assembly area, perhaps on a DIY basis by providing course start time labels that participants peel off and present to the starter. What would not be acceptable is a simple queuing system. We could have participants walking for 20 minutes to the start to find they are joining a line with possibly a 30 minute wait. It may help an understanding of the problem to appreciate the numbers involved. At the recent Eugowra ‘Seldom Seen’ (SL5) event in NSW, the entries per course (Red 5-9) were 14, 26, 40, 31 and 20. Entries for the lesser courses were all well below 20. Slot-ins would not have been difficult for the starter except perhaps for Red 7. The Victorians run their State League events totally on an ‘Enter on the Day’ basis which seems to work well. Some would grizzle about having to mark their own maps – not a problem for me. Hopefully we can successfully balance the needs of officialdom with customers. That’s right – customers, because that is how participants should be treated if bush orienteering is to survive.