In part 1, we looked at the three most popular methods for designing relay courses, and in this instalment we’ll look at sprint relays.

Sprint Relays

According to the IOF competition format guidelines:

1. The Sprint Relay profile is mixed-gender high-speed head-to-head competition. It takes place in an urban and park environment. The format is a combination of the Sprint and Relay concepts. There are four legs and the first and last legs must be run by women.
2. The winning time (the total time for the winning team) must be 55-60 minutes. The time for each leg must be 12-15 minutes so the first and last legs (which are run by women) should be a little shorter than the second and third legs.

The following examples are schematic outlines of the women’s and men’s courses from the WOC 2022 Sprint Relay (distances shown are approximate and maps for both courses are available from the WOC 2022 website).

Legs 1 and 4 (women)

Legs 2 and 3 (men)

Although the courses are shown as separate, this is done only to emphasise the differences between them (see point 2 above). In practice, they will usually be combined into a single course, as shown in the examples below from Condes and OCAD. It is possible to set sprint relay courses in Purple Pen, but its relay setting functionality is limited so care would have to be taken to ensure that winning times are for the women’s and men’s legs are consistent with the guidelines.

Note that the distances are not the exact distances for the actual courses.

The courses in WOC2022 use the Farsta method. There are four forks in each course, and each fork has two variations, with team members running complementary variations within each fork, for example the winning Swedish team ran courses aBBAA, bBABA, bABAB, aAABB (a denoting the women’s course, and b denoting the men’s course, with the uppercase letters denoting the variations within each fork). As we effectively have two courses, the variations are specific to each course, e.g., if the first leg runner runs 110, 107, 111 for the first fork, the fourth leg runner will run 102, 110, 120 and vice versa. Thus Lina Strand ran 102, 110, 120, and Tove Alexandersson ran 110, 107, 111 for their early controls.

Course planning software

Both OCAD and Condes use a similar technique to design sprint relay courses. Both programs have two fork styles:

• In OCAD, they are called Team Variations and Leg Variations, and in Condes they are called Regular Forks and Leg Forks.
• Team Variations/Regular Forks are forks that all team members can potentially be assigned. Leg Variations/Leg Forks are forks that are allocated to specific legs.

This feature is particularly useful in sprint relays as it allows us to design courses that are effectively two relay courses in the one overall course. In contrast, PurplePen only has one forking style (equivalent to the Team Variation/Regular Fork in OCAD and Condes), so if using PurplePen, my recommendation would be to set two courses and then use event management software to assign variations to the women and men members of the teams (I’m happy to be corrected on this).

In this exercise, I have replicated the WOC Women’s and Men’s courses, and then combined them using Leg Variations/Leg Forks 

 OCAD

This is how courses would appear in OCAD if they were set as two separate courses:

Women	Men

To combine them into a single course:

1.  Create a new course, e.g. “SprintRelay” with 4 legs:

2.  Select SprintRelay and create two leg variants by selecting Insert… and selecting Leg variation in the Insert Course Object dialog box

3.  Click and drag the legs as shown below.

4.  Add the Womens and Mens courses to the leg variations as if you were creating two two-leg relays:

Note that the forks within the leg variations are Team variations rather than Leg variations.

Condes

To create “leg forks” in Condes, use Course>Edit course … and in the Course dialog box choose the Relay tab at the bottom of the left-hand panel, then select “Insert leg fork” from the Forks drop-down box).

This will bring up the following dialog box:

In the Leg distribution dialog box, drag and drop 3 from column C to column B (men), and 4 from column D to column A (women) to assign women team members to legs 1 and 4, and men team members to legs 2 and 3:

Note that you can bring up the Leg distribution dialog box by right-clicking the leg-fork graphic in the Course Relay dialog box.

After defining the leg distribution, you can then use the Insert Regular fork option to complete the courses:

Adding regular forks

Allocating courses to teams

Once the courses have been planned, you can allocate your courses. Condes has the facility to allocate courses to teams, which will mean that each team will run a fair course (i.e. all teams will run the same overall course – you can do this manually, but allowing the software to do it for you is a safe way to ensure that courses are fair.. 

Hint – Don’t use team numbers 1 to 10 – in that way, you won’t create confusion amongst runners who aren’t quite sure whether the “1-3” on the back of a map is “runner 1 for team 3” or “runner 3 for team 1”. A good option is to prefix the team number with the course number (e.g. 101 – 120 for teams running course 1, 201-225 for teams running course 2 etc).

If your course planning software does not support team allocation, it’s possible that your event management software does. If neither does, desk-checking is essential to ensure fair courses.

Looking at the variation allocations for the WOC 2022 sprint relay suggests that the organisers focused on the requirement that the competition provides “high-speed head-to-head competition”. They ignored automatic team allocation to ensure evenly balanced (and seeded) variations – with 33 teams entered, only eight variations (four complementary pairs) were used in both the women’s and men’s courses, each with either 8 or 9 runners per variation:

Variation pairs used: 

Map printing

It is essential that teams are allocated the appropriate maps. Some course-planning software provides the ability to print team and runner information on the back of the map (with the appropriate printer). This can greatly assist the competition setup, especially if a “clothes line” arrangement is used (as shown in the example below):

Other factors to consider when designing relay courses are: 

• The time difference between alternative variations should be small (this is especially relevant in sprint orienteering when the running distance between controls could vary significantly from the straight-line distance). 
• The best teams should be carefully allocated to different forking combinations.
• For fairness reasons the very last part of the last leg must be the same for all runners.

These requirements are discussed in OA rules appendix 8 and IOF rules appendix 6.