British Night Championships, 7th February 2026

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These results are now final and drawing on Routegadget is enabled.

If you have any queries or corrections, please email results@herts-orienteering.club

Organiser’s Comments

If the principal task of the Organiser is to organise the weather, we’re talking 7/10 on the day and 2/10 leading up to it. Many thanks to the parking team who coped with the conditions and even pivoted to a different solution for the Sunday event. They were of course only part of what was an impressive effort by many people from HH and LOK, plus Neil Crickmore, our controller from SO. In conversation with a couple of you, I used the analogy of the swan appearing serene on the surface while paddling hard underneath. I hope you appreciated the (attempted) serenity while recognising the paddling was happening.

Our apologies for the issue with control 123, compounded by the database synchronisation fault. As you see above, this is now resolved, you all have accurate times and the correct people were awarded medals.

We’ve had nothing but approving comments about the courses and the map, most of you seemed to think it struck the right balance between testing and enjoyable.

Finally, thank you all for coming and congratulations to all the medallists, particularly Megan and Graham. An abiding memory will be the atmosphere in the marquee as people reviewed their runs and watched M/W21L on the GPS tracking screen.

Planner (and Co-Organiser)’s comments

The area probably doesn’t meet all of the criteria for a classic night event and the bracken was always a concern.  However, in the last few weeks, more legs across open forest became possible and your comments suggest that you enjoyed the variety, even in such a small area, and it seems to have kept you thinking both at night and in daylight.

Mike has mentioned the challenges with the parking and we certainly didn’t expect everyone to be running through the cars parked in the forest, sometimes next to a control.  The farmer and her tractor drivers were brilliant in their support of both days, so our sincere thanks to them.

South of the road gave some longer legs and Routegadget is showing the range of route choices that people made (including some we hadn’t predicted) – please do put your route on if possible.  North of the road is relatively easy but it was good to see people wobbling towards the end of their courses.

We wanted to make this feel like a British Championships and the radio controls feeding Live Results plus the GPS tracking on courses 1 & 2 added to the occasion, with people in the UK and abroad following the action.

Having two events in two days was always going to be a challenge so our thanks to all club members who answered the call to help, it really was a team effort.  Special thanks to Helen Marsden for planning Sunday’s Middle courses which received lots of praise both from those who had seen it all in the dark before and those who hadn’t.

Simon Errington’s map was widely praised for its clarity and how it handles the complex vegetation.  I would like to thank Simon for the many hours he spent on updating the map over the months.  And a quick thank you to Jack at BML printers for his great service.

There are lots of ‘systems’ to manage in order to enable entries, start lists, download, GPS, Live Results, Routegadget, final results etc to appear on time and Kevin Parkes (and his team) managed this brilliantly and calmly, well done.

Finally, our double thanks to Neil Crickmore for controlling both days and for his support and encouragement throughout the last year or so.

I hope to see you at next year’s BNOC, run by Swansea Bay on Saturday 20 February 2027 at Broughton Burrows.

Controller’s Comments

It’s always important that that we learn from previous mistakes. Although I felt that the event was excellently planned and organised we should reflect on things which didn’t go exactly to plan and from my perspective there were two main examples of this.

The first concerned the fact that controls only being used for the Sunday were out in the forest on the Saturday. There were good reasons for this in that there were limited hours of light to get things out and checked on the Sunday, especially since the large entry had necessitated a 10am first start time. I had insisted that no control that was within 60m of a night control should be in place on the Saturday night, in addition there would be no boxes on those units and the final details would warn about there being non-active controls out in the terrain. Despite this we did have a number of competitors who came across such a control en route to theirs, assumed that the box had gone missing on their control and used the back-up punch. The unfortunate issue was that while we had decided late on that these Sunday controls could have flags (albeit placed on the ground) the final details were not updated and said that no flags would be present. More bizarrely, at the control is question the flag was placed on the ground when put out, and it was on the ground at 7:30 the next morning but several competitors confirmed that it was hanging at some point during the night. Presumably some well-meaning competitor must have hung (and unhung) it at some point. I still don’t have any problem with that plan to have the controls out in the terrain but was surprised by just how much the confusion about whether or not a flag would be present affected the competitors’ mindset. In our defence the control was over 100m from the intended control and on a very different feature.

The second issue, which Mike has mentioned , concerned control 123. An early runner came in and was told that they had missed a control. They claimed that they had punched properly but as a controller I’ve experienced many cases where a competitor swears that they punched properly and were later shown not to have done so. Shortly after another runner came in with the same problem which started to ring alarm bells – yet others had come in and got a valid punch at the control indicating that the control was working OK. What then followed was a forensic examination of a possible cause including taking a replacement unit out to the control and observing what was happening with the competitors. It was then established that all competitors were getting a valid punch at the control but some were still getting disqualified upon download. More investigation revealed that competitors downloading at one laptop were getting DSQed whereas the other laptop was giving the OK feedback. Fortunately enough experts were on hand to sort all this out one way or another.

Both of these issues were not ones that I had anticipated being a problem but are now added to my mental list for future events.

Photos

Photos by Robert Lines https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCJN5

Plus some by our club member Neil Gostick https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCJWPq