Explained: The ARWC 2009 Race Format
One of the big stories of the 2009 AR World Championships was the style of the race. I had the opportunity to see the event myself, and it took me a few days of asking questions to piece together how this race worked. Let me share with you what I learned.
Instead of the traditional “first team across the finish line wins” race format, this Portuguese organization is known for an alternative style where the team who obtains the most checkpoints is the winner. The main rules are easy to summarize:
-The team who visits the most checkpoints wins
-The race is divided into several Stages
-Each race Stage has a set cut-off time and no team will get credit for visiting checkpoints on a Stage after the cut-off time
-If a team is still on a Stage after the cut-off time, they will be routed on a shorter course for the next Stage and have significantly fewer checkpoints available to them for that next Stage
ATP/Salomon studies maps at the AR World Championships
This all doesn’t sound too strange, but consider that in a regular adventure race if you miss a cut-off, you’re forever ranked below all the teams who successfully made the cut-off; it has a permanent impact on your race result. At this race, when you missed a cut-off, you are penalized by having fewer checkpoints available to you for the next section of the race . . . but it’s not permanent, and you end up spending less time on this next section because you’re on a shorter course. At the end of this shortened section, you resume racing on the “full” course again and can obtain as many checkpoints as you can again. In practice, missing a cut-off can be a jumpstart for teams to speed past parts of the race that don’t suit them or are particularly tough; teams who realized this early enough during the race decided to intentioanlly miss cut-offs and strategically decide to focus on specific parts of the course.
This is compounded by the fact that teams were not given a clear and concise explanation of the race format, so many teams were learning as the race went on. Even worse, at the pre-race briefing teams were told that it was a key idea *not* to miss any cut-offs, and if teams were confused by the format, that they should keep that one concept in mind.
One final complication with the race format was the inclusion of “clustered” checkpoints on the race course. Some checkpoints would be labeled 56A, 56B, and 56C on the maps. In order to get credit for checkpoint 56, teams would have to visit 56A, 56B, and 56C — and if they just obtained 56A, for example, they would get no credit at all. I spoke with several teams that didn’t know this until the final day of the race, and so they may have visited 56B and 56C, but bypassed 56A and not gotten credit for anything.
I can see the attraction of a race style such as this: all the teams crossed the finish line within 4 hours of one another, and throughout the course teams were grouped much closer together than at a conventional race. Considering most expedition adventure race winners cross the finish line days before the last teams, this format in Portugal has appeal in that regard.
There are other positives, too, such as forcing teams to evaluate their route options closely and really understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Unfortunately, the absence of communications about the race format is more an issue than the particulars of this race style. If all the teams understand how the race is operated, it’s a level playing field where everyone has the same information. Then the focus on the race course can be on out-racing the competition, instead of figuring out how the race operates.
This race format is not the norm in Europe, and besides some races in the United Kingdom and this one race in Portugal, there are no other organizations I know of hosting events in this style. There were many sighs of relief when the 2010 Adventure Racing World Championships in Spain announced that their race format would be “traditional, first across the finish line wins.”
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