[department of crappy engineering] from a race official
Went to help out at Legs & Paddles 2007 (LNP2007) today.I’m not going to slam NUS Canoeing Sub Club, afterall every organization may make mistakes, but I just wish to share some areas of improvement.Everything started late. Imagine we were deploying the road marshallers halfway when the first runner caught up, and the road marshallers had to run in front of the competitors. Lunch was late, I had mine at 2:30pm. Ended late, I only left at like 7:30pm when the event was supposed to end at 5:30pm.There was clearly a shortage of manpower. I didn’t go to the toilet for 12 hours because my station was critical and noone was available to stand in. We couldn’t even refill our water. Some volunteers also left early, and the vacuum wasn’t filled. Some runners ran all the way to Robinson Quay when they were supposed to U turn at Clarke Quay. I had competitors coming to me saying they ran 3 rounds instead of 2 because there were no marshallers guiding them. One of them was even crying, while a few scolded me like free when I clearly didn’t and couldn’t do anything wrong. I could have just left my station early and let the station behind me get the scoldings.Talking about abuse, a female marshaller had verbal abuses just because the logistic people delivered the water container late and the first few runners had no water at the designated water point. The poor girl had to note down tag numbers on a clipboard, had to fill cups with water, had to pick up the used cups on the ground, and the organiser refused to resupply paper cups. One of the worst things that can happen to a volunteer is to be scolded, unreasonably.On the part about people running 3 laps instead of 2, did the organiser brief the competitors properly or not? And the competitors, did you study the routes before coming? This is not like climbing competitions where you don’t know the routes beforehand, in this case the map was emailed to you! So you would happily run 42km instead of 10km if noone stopped you?Enough of bitching, maybe I’ll post the funny stuffs during the race another time.
