O! O! B..... Ori, Mike rue MTBO error

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Last Updated: Wednesday, 21 March 2018 13:01

Newcastle's Glen Charlton is gearing up for another big year of MTBO after a strong second placing in the Victorian MTBO Sprint champs on Sunday.

Glen was just a minute behind visiting Swiss Adrian Jäggi as less than four minutes separated the top seven riders in the men's Elite class at Creswick Golf Resort.

There was further success for Newcastle as Carolyn Matthews comfortably won W50A, and Rob Vincent took out M60A from clubmate Malcolm Roberts.

Sadly, the Middle and Long Distance Champs were cancelled due to the extreme fire risk, and hope to be rescheduled. It left Orienteering Australia with some tough decisions as the events were meant to be the Australian selection trials for this year's world champs.

In the M40 age class, Garingal's Michael Ridley-Smith and Uringa's Ori Gudes were disqualified for going through an out-of-bounds area.

To Michael's chagrin, he had followed Ori - and neither of them heard Kiwi Ed Steenbergen calling out to warn them they were going through OOB. Upon being informed after finishing, both immediately self-reported out of fairness.

Michael had recorded the fastest time and Ori second quickest. 

The offending area (marked in red on the map insert) was a 12m section of forest mapped as white that lay between parallel bike tracks (in MTBO, off-track riding is forbidden). Ori mistakenly assumed it was an unmarked track and took what turned out to be a painful shortcut. 

"Don't follow anyone" is a point we always stress with newcomers for various reasons, and yet pretty much everyone of us has probably been drawn into doing so at some stage. Another coaching point reinforced is to read the map carefully. Lessons learnt.  

Michael at least made the most of the 48-hour cancellation notice to drop into Collector for Foot O State League 1 on Saturday afternoon where he placed fourth in the competitive M50A age class. Thus he competed in two formats inside 24 hours and travelled through three states!