MAPLINK
MapLink keeps Orienteering alive during Melbourne’s long locked-down winter DEBBIE DODD (OV) Photos: Geoff Hudson & Michael Hubbert
Debbie Dodd with QR check-in.
T
he new Winter fixture was fresh from the printers, and we were putting the finishing touches on our annual summer Awards Night, when the first Lockdown was announced. It was hard to believe we’d just hosted hundreds of orienteers from all over Australia for the Melbourne Sprint Weekend – soon to become a fond memory of better times.
tradition. And the best bit? You could avoid running on those chilly autumn/winter nights – perfect now that huddling together for warmth was no longer allowed.
In fact, MapLink is so much more than a DIY Library (we rapidly built one of those, too – it has over 700 maps from previous bush, park-street, sprint and MTBO events). Maps of previous events are all well and good, but, well, we’ve done them already. We have short attention spans! We want something new!!
Of course we were all desperate to get back together for real events as soon as possible. Our wish was granted in late May, when “training” was allowed for groups of 20. Online pre-entry and staggered starts quickly became our norm, replacing Melbourne StreetO’s famously casual “rock up and chuck $5 in the bucket, and mass start at 7” approach. MapRun allowed us to have contactless punching. We wondered if anyone would want to come; after the first week we had to offer overflow daytime sessions to accommodate the numbers, and events were regularly over-subscribed (a first for Orienteering!)
Knowing we’d need to get maps online quickly for people to exercise with, a small group sprang into action faster than you can say “vaccine”; within 24 hours, MapLink was born. “Oh, that’s just another collection of old maps for people to print off and use when they like” you say. “We’ve all done that”.
People took to MapLink with great enthusiasm, and it was good fun; the best part was that without the need for large parking areas, we could start from previously unused locations in unfamiliar sections of some maps, giving a completely new feel to places we’d been many times. MapRun stats tell us that 2000 people used the app in Melbourne between April and September, and we estimate the same number again used MapLink without MapRun – that’s 20 people a day that otherwise would not have been orienteering.
The call went out, and within no time, course setters were creating brand new courses; our MapRun team were setting up kml/kmz files at warp speed; we had a MapLink facebook page, an online virtual scoring system, and a Google docs library, which started filling up with maps. We were quickly spoilt for choice. People could use MapRun with their MapLink course, then share and discuss the best (or worst) routes, and sledge each other in fine Melbourne StreetO
Melbourne crawled agonizingly slowly along its first Roadmap out of restrictions. We had 6 wonderful weeks of some sort of freedom, and had just held our first two competitive events for Winter, when the
18 THE AUSTRALIAN ORIENTEER MARCH 2021
