Hälsingekavlen is a traditional relay competition, which is held in the district of Hälsingland every year by another club. For the 2004 competition, organisers had introduced a new format, which is related to the format of the famous 25-manna relay competition.
However, there are some differences compared to 25-manna.
The first leg is started as an Xtra leg. In Sweden, this means that every team can have 1-4 runners at the start, who will run the same course simultaneously (or even together). The first of them will change over to the second runner.
Leg 2 is a normal leg (one runner).
The leg 2 runner changes over to 3 runners who run the 3rd leg simultaneously. Also legs 4-6 are run by 3 runners simultaneously. There is no predefined change over rule f.ex. which 3rd runner must change over to which 4th runner, and so on. Instead, each team itself must decide who has to change over to which next runner, with the following goal.
The last leg 6 runner can change over to the (normal single) leg 7 runner. This means that the legs 3-6 must be composed in that way that all leg 6s finish as close together as possible. The 3 parallel courses for each of those legs are of the same length and branched as usual. The runners can take any of the remaining maps of their leg and team.
Legs 7 and 8 (these are runners 15 and 16) will be run again as a normal relay.
This had been realised by a special version of the standard software: OS2003 för Hälsingekavlen.
Special features of OS2003 för Hälsingekavlen:
- Handling teams of 19 runners (OS2003 standard is 10)
- Entries: special handling of the runners.
- Course combination assignment: The combinations can not be preassigned to a particular runner, but only to the whole team.
- Code checking: when reading the SI cards in the finish, the software must find out the correct team, leg and combination automatically.
- SI card evaluation: A new fast online function is necessary to handle errors/mispunches quickly. In peak times of legs 3-6 there will be 50-70 runners finishing per minute. Failures of the automatic assignments (when a runner had mispunched) must be fixed manually before the next runner arrives. Such cases will be shown automatically in a special window on a client PC, where an operator is waiting for them.
- Extra handling of the late start: It is possible that any runner must start in the late start. There are special rules to calculate valid results for them. (Of course, the main precondition is that none of the 16-19 runners has mispunched.)
- Preliminary results according to the competition rules.
- Some special reports required by Hälsingekavlen.
The package also includes the special speaker software OSSpeaker för Hälsingekavlen. Besides the adaptation to the special data structure of OS2003 för Hälsingekavlen, some changes in the computing algorithms were necessary, compared to the standard OSSpeaker.
The speaker window offers detailed information also about the standings within the legs 3-6. That means, you can see the standings related to the 1st until the 3rd runner of those legs.
The preliminary results are displayed in a similar layout. There is also an automatic function which prints a new results page for every 10 teams, after they had completed a leg.
The report about missing SI cards shows which SI cards had not yet been read within a specified time interval after the finish punch. They can then be called by the speaker during the event.