This is not a lofty goal to which one aspires. It is what can happen when things go wrong. The idea for this article came as a result of my experiences as a meet official for the 1996 ONB championships.
Meet officials are responsible for putting on a good meet. Barring major disasters, such as global thermonuclear war, the officials should be able to put on a good meet. The ONB championships were seriously flawed. Since you can read this, it is evident that no global war is responsible.
The administrative and field service aspects seemed to be acceptable. In fact there was more help the usual, thanks to assistance from the cadet corps. Map printing and clue sheets were fine. So what's left. Map errors and a control in the wrong place. The results had to be discarded from the elite men's course and women's course.
How did this happen? It was not due to lack of effort from the meet director or course setter. It is probable that considerably more effort was expended putting on that meet than any other meet which ONB held in 1996. However, the map suffered from a need for many changes due to extensive logging. The afflicted areas were remapped and new trails were cut.
In the process of remapping, numerous map errors and serious inconsistencies were found. It looked like it had been mapped by committee, and in a sense it was. Several people had worked on the map over its 10 year life.
This brings up a curious aside. Map inconsistency buildup over time has been common. It might be expected that this problem would be aggravated by the adoption of OCAD for computer map generation and updates. Surprisingly, it has been my experience that this has become less of a problem. I believe it has become so easy to make changes, responsible mappers are resolving discrepancies as they are encountered.
Even a bad map can be accommodated; don't put controls in poorly mapped areas. Oops. The bogus control was put on a parallel feature that was not even on the map. Don't make mistakes? Not possible. It is the job of the controller to verify that courses are within norms and that controls are placed correctly. From a mental outlook standpoint, the job of the course setter is to establish good courses. The job of the controller is to find what's wrong with them and to work with the setter to fix them. In my opinion, the most important task of the controller is to make sure that each control can be reached as expected from all reasonable attack points.
Are any of these ideas unique. No. They are all in the official's manual for A meets.
So what happened? It was felt that a sedentary controller would be acceptable in this case; the controller never visited the site. Wrong! It was left to the competitors to find the mistakes.
Jump forward two weeks to the Autumn Amble. Although this was a B meet, a controller was used, even though not required. In fact there was one control that the controller thought was in a different location than the course setter. Unfortunately there was not sufficient time to confirm which position was correct. Competitors were informed of the two possibilities and when it was not in the first place, the control was found in the second. So a potential problem was avoided.
I don't wish to imply that other meets held over the season were flawless. The most fascinating mistake may have been at Rockwood Park in the autumn when the wrong scale was used to calculate the distances; the courses were 50% longer than advertised.
The concept of a course setter/controller team works when used as intended. We won't make that mistake again (plenty of others are available).
It is curious how the bad control placement was confirmed. When the course setter was picking up controls after the meet, he approached the fateful control from a different direction and discovered a magnificent parallel feature. That is why courses 7 and 8 were disallowed and removed from calculations of rankings. Otherwise the results would have remained, potentially changing rankings and affecting the provincial monetary support for some athletes.
Other than a few whimpers, no complaint had been lodged by the competitors. Complain. In the same sense that competitors use race results to hone their skills, meet officials need feedback to know where improvement could be made. It is not possible to fix what remains invisible.