The AR World Championships - Costa Rica
Unranked is Unranked
Rob Howard / 06.12.2013
There has been a bit of confusion about what is happening to those teams who have cut checkpoints out in the Mangrove paddle in order to be able to continue around the course, so I tracked down the Race Director Pongo Baker to get some answers. (He is a busy man, answering questions left right and centre, as the race spreads out across half of Costa Rica.)
The answer is simple enough – any team, cutting any checkpoint is unranked, and all the unranked teams will be classified together. “I have seen so much confusion in the past as teams who are unranked argue about who did more of the course and which unranked team is higher than another as a result. We are not doing that, the fact is they didn’t do the whole course and so they are unranked, and that is the end of it.”
[The confusion has arisen as the leaderboard is still showing the teams who cut checkpoints as ranked, but that is an error, and fairly shortly you should see the list of unranked teams increase as its updated.]
The race are trying to allow teams to do as much of the course as is feasible within their resources and just as we were speaking 3 members of a retired Costa Rican team set off up Chirripo, just to have the chance to climb the mountain. They will come back down to mid-camp.
“We booked the whole park for 4 days,” said Baker, “so we want to allow teams to make the most of it. We booked all the places in the huts and the park is closed to anyone but us for these 4 days, plus teams get to travel across country no one else is ever allowed to. So it makes a lot of sense to cut earlier checkpoints if you are going slowly, then enjoy this trek and try to finish the race.”
He also reconfirmed the Dark Zone at TA7 will be enforced at 2pm. Teams will then have to complete the short trek to the start of the rafting and be on the water by 3pm. The transition will reopen at 5am next morning, and the race will effectively be split there – my guess at the moment is for the top 10 teams to get through, but if teams take longer on the trek than expected (there is heavy cloud) it could be less.
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