HQ Builth Wells
Competition terrain, Elan Valley
Wales, UK
The OMM 2009 event in the Elan Valley will be based at the Royal Welsh Showground in Builth Wells, which offers good parking for 3000 competitors, buildings for race HQ and secure communications. Competitors will register there before the competition on the weekend of October 24/25th and will be bussed to the start/finish areas, a new departure for the event.The start and finish locations
will still be in hills and countryside surrounding the Elan Valley and
the overnight camp(s) will as always be at a remote location.
Nature of the event.
Founded in 1968, the OMM is the world's premier event of its kind and is designed to test the teamwork, self-reliance, endurance, outdoor and navigational skills of over 1500 teams of two from more than 15 countries around the world. The ethos of the event is to be totally self-reliant throughout the event and carrying all clothing, equipment, tent, sleeping bag and food for 36 hours without any outside support, GPS or cell phone. There are seven different classes, the longest being the Elite, which comprises approximately two consecutive marathon length days (42km per day) with up to 3000m of ascent.
This
comment by Peter Tyldesley, Director of Countryside & Land
Management 2004-2007, Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, who
competed in the OMM Score class 2008, sums up the view of dozens of
runners who were talking to the press.
‘As many commentators have said more eloquently than I can, the OMM
represents the last vestiges of a spirit of self-reliance that the
British used to be famous for. We must defend those last vestiges at
all costs.’
Circumstances of the 2008 event.
The storms and floods which occurred before and during last year’s race in the Lake District, which caused the event to be abandoned for the first time in its 42 year history and resulted in inaccurate ‘news’ headlines across the world, have led to some operational changes, although the fundamental principles and ethos of the event remain the same as they always have. Our event centre lacked telecoms due to its valley-bottom location hence we were temporarily cut-off from outside news, although we had internal emergency comms operating as always.
It
was a shock when Rob Howard of Sleepmonsters returned back to 2008
event HQ early Sunday morning after the floods subsided, and greeted me
with: 'Mike, do you realise what's happened? The OMM event has replaced
Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and the world recession as the number one
news headline.' Within hours we had several outside broadcast
satellite news units around us and the communications black-out had
contributed to the media frenzy which saw the story
of “thousands lost in atrocious conditions” flash around the TV and
computer screens of the world. Reuters and PA carried this 'news' as
'facts' and by Monday morning there were 2,000 internet media articles
world wide. In actual fact everyone was safely accounted for by Sunday
afternoon and all were skilled enough to navigate themselves to safety
and equipped to survive overnight on the hills as required. (see final report and statistics for 2008).
The so-called 'news' was initiated by a bit of 'citizen reporting' from
a local businessman, presumably for self publicity purposes and he made
provocative statements about the safety of our runners. To try and
prevent misleading reports of this nature this year, we decided to
provide better press and viewer reports and information by linking with
a new sponsor, the SPECTRA Group (UK) Ltd.
Spectra specialise in deploying satellite communications in remote locations and have worldwide experience working on defence and government contracts. Spectra will be deploying SHADE,
a self-contained, rapid deployment network infrastructure that will
deliver voice and data communications throughout the event. It will
include the installation of portable satellite systems at three sites
providing full telecoms capability using standard handsets. SHADE also provides access to the internet using laptop PCs. see full report on news reporting for the 09 event.
OTHER ISSUES ARISING AFTER THE 08 EVENT.
- 'The Police were not informed.' As a matter of courtesy we always inform the local police, however it is not a requirement and the Police do not keep a data base of events; their job is public law and order. 999 emergency calls requesting mountain rescue are redirected but the Police have a coordinating role.
- Charity events; there is sometimes an assumption that we are like a charity event; we are NOT a charity event. However as much as we admire the public spirited nature of the participants we have the observation that many of them do something different each year which doesn't build the skills, experience and resulting judgment necessary for our event. All our participants are carefully vetted for skills and experience bearing in mind that a team of 2 adds very much to the safety factor.
- Cumbria NHS raised issues about costs; this was before they had understood the fact that there were only 12 casualties referred.
- Mountain Rescue costs. RAF Mountain Rescue is a Government funded body and there is no mechanism to make a contribution but our positive and warm thanks go to those RAF personnel who helped. Mountain Rescue Teams are charity funded and are operated by volunteers. The event contributed £7,000 to Lakeland MR after the 2008 event.
- Resiliency planning: is a requirement of the UK govt that all counties have a resiliency plan. During the OMM event 'the button' was pressed for reasons of general flooding and this opened a pandoras box of resources which needed then to be used even though they were not needed by our event.
- Why we ban GPS. The original reason we decided not to allow GPS was that we considered it should be a test of navigation using original methods. However the experience of seeing GPS used on the hills generally leads us now to a firm belief that forbidding the use of GPS adds to the safety of the event. This is because an understanding of map contours and other important symbols and their relationship with the physical topography is vital for participants.
More information is available from the event website which will carry live reports, photographs and video of the race and can be seen at http://www.theomm.com/event
Further press information is available from Event Press Director Mike Parsons. phone/07771 706069 email contact theomm.mike@googlemail.com
..................ends.