Mystery of Ranking Points!

By David Lobley

Orienteering is an odd sport in more ways than one, but one of its particular peculiarities is that every event is totally different from the rest, with variations on distance, difficulty and standard of opposition. Before the invention of BOF Ranking Points, these variations make it almost impossible to compare performances across events, for example, how do you rank –

3rd place / 16 on Blue at a Shorne Woods Regional Event in Danson Park running 10 mins / km;

35th place / 65 on M55L at British Champs in South East running 10 mins / km; and

9th place / 48 on Course C at the Icenian Urban Sprints running <6 mins / km???

The problem is solved by the use of the mysterious Ranking Points which magically appear on the BOF website (https:// www.britishorienteering.org.uk/rankings) sometime in the middle of the night immediately after the results are posted to the website.

Points are awarded at all Level B and above events to all BOF Members apart from those under 18 (much to the annoyance of Luke!) and basically worked out so that an “Average” runner having an “Average” run will score 1000 points. So if you are that mythical average runner, slap bang in the middle of all the c 5,000 BOF Members and you always have your average run, same you’ll always get the same 1,000 points. If you do better than average, you get more than 1,000 points, up to a maximum for the top runners in the country of about 1,450 and if you do worse than average you get less, with the spread of points based upon a “Normal Distribution” which is where I switch off and leave it to an actuary in the club (Ian C-P) to follow on!

Ranking Points then go to make up the Ranking List which adds together your best 6 scores achieved over the last 12 months to rank everyone in the country down from Alexander Chepelin with 8,544 points to poor John Toll with just 91 points (although to be fair he has only done 1 event!), with the rest of us fitting in somewhere inbetween.

And so, how do you predict your RP’s? This is where it gets difficult!!!! Obviously a “decent” run should give you a decent score, but will it get you a magical Top 6 Score to move you up the list? It’s here that lot of factors come in to account, but ultimately it comes down to:

How good was the competition? - In theory it makes no difference but it seems that you get more points doing badly on top courses than doing well on low courses. (Again I’ll leave it to Ian to explain!); and

How did the others do? - If everyone had a decent run it’s not good news! Best points are achieved when you have a clean run and others mess up. Nailing a “Bingo” control is a good route to big points!

It’s just a question of waiting for the results to be posted to BOF followed (in my case!) by a sleepless night checking every two hours for the Points to be posted!

However, if like me you can’t wait for results to be posted to BOF website, (and you have average or above Excel competence), I have a spreadsheet I’m happy to share that predicts your points. Just download results from SI results, and the latest Ranking List from BOF to get predicted points within accuracy of about +/- 10 pts.

And finally, the answer to my original question, these are 3 of my results (as I’m sure some realised!) and ranking is –

1st – 3rd at Shorne, 1,185 Pts

2nd – 35th at British, 1,152 Pts

3rd – 9th at Icenian, 1,142 Pts