7 Cerros Medellin Urban Adventure Race
Penalties for top teams on last day make difference in final standings
Jacqueline Windh / 27.09.2007
Sweden’s Lundhags Adventure had gained a 22 minute advantage over overall leaders Teva-La Pinilla in the first section on this third day of competition – a 31 km inline skate through MedellÃn, the Swede’s specialty. Spain had a cumulative lead of 30 minutes over Sweden after the first two days of competition, and we were all wondering if the Swedes could make up the remaining eight minutes they needed on the remaining sections in order to place first overall.
The Swedes managed just to maintain their lead, arriving at the finish ine 20 minutes before the Spaniards – but a number of complicated penalties left us all wondering who would be the overall winner once everything was figured out. Here is what happened:
On the early orienteering section, the Swedes cruised through (led by orienteering champion Tobias) while Spain, travelling and navigating with USA’s Team Sole, somehow missed one control point. No one is sure how that happened, but somehow when these two teams turned in their maps, they had the wrong punch-mark registered at one of the controls, so they each received 30 minutes. At this point, we all thought that Lundhags had it in the bag, but not so...
The other challenge for the day was a climbing wall. Teams had to send all four team members up and, according to the rule book, each team member who did not make it to the top would account for a 30 minute penalty for their team. As the race was going on, Race Director Jorge Llano was thinking of reworking this penalty system to smaller values per person, since this system (up to 2 hours per team) seemed unduly heavy for a race of this length (total time on course on the order of 20-30 hours). Sole and Spain each got three people to the top, but Sweden only got two.
Jorge, listening to the comments by several teams, eventually stuck with the original penalty system. As Sole’s Karen Lundgren says, “During the race, we make decisions on the course according to what is in the rule book. It’s not right to change those things after the fact.� So, Spain and Sole got 30 minutes and Sweden got 60.... in other words, these three teams’ penalties all averaged out for the day.
Sweden made up significant time, winning the stage on the final day... but it was just not quite enough to beat the Spaniards, who raced strong and consistently through all three days.
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