Complaints and Protests in MTBO – What Every Competitor Should Know

Most MTBO events finish with everyone accepting their result, packing up their bike and heading home. Occasionally, however, something happens during a race that raises a question about whether the rules have been applied correctly or whether a competitor has been treated fairly.

Perhaps your SPORTident card failed mid-race. Perhaps you reached the correct control site but the control stand or unit was missing. Maybe you were given or accidentally picked up, the wrong map at the start.

What happens then?

The Mountain Bike Orienteering Competition Rules provide a formal complaint and protest process for resolving these situations. Importantly, a complaint and a protest are not the same thing.

First step – make a complaint

A complaint is the first formal step.

A complaint may be made about an infringement of the competition rules or the organiser’s directions. Both competitors and team officials may make complaints. The complaint must be made, ideally in writing, to the organiser, via the registration desk, as soon as possible, and it is the organiser who initially decides the complaint.

Normally, the time limit is 15 minutes after the result of the competitor concerned has been published, although an organiser may specify a different time limit in the final event bulletin. Exceptional circumstances can allow a late complaint to be considered.

This first step allows straightforward matters to be investigated and resolved without unnecessarily involving the jury.

The organiser should investigate what happened, collect the relevant information, hear from the people involved and where appropriate, seek advice from the Event Controller. The jury is not activated at this stage.

What if you disagree with the Organisers decision?

If you are dissatisfied with the organiser’s decision, you can move to the next stage – a protest.

A protest is made against the organiser’s decision on the complaint. It can only be made by the competitor or team official who made the original complaint. In other words, you cannot skip the complaint stage and go directly to a protest.

The protest must normally be submitted in writing within 15 minutes of being informed of the organiser’s decision.

Once a protest has been lodged, the decision passes from the organiser to the jury.

What does the jury do?

A jury is appointed to rule on protests. The Event Controller leads the jury but does not vote. The organiser may have a representative present to provide information, but that person also has no vote.

The jury can require the organiser to take action, such as reinstating a competitor who was disqualified, disqualifying a competitor whom the organiser had accepted, voiding the results of a class, or approving results that the organiser had declared invalid.

This gives the jury considerably more scope than simply answering “yes” or “no” to a protest.

A protest effectively has three possible outcomes

This is an aspect of the process that competitors sometimes misunderstand.

In practical terms, a protest can have three different outcomes:

1. The protest is rejected.
The jury decides that the organiser’s original decision was correct. The result remains unchanged.

2. The protest is upheld and the result is changed.
The jury agrees that the complaint was justified and determines that corrective action is required. For example, a competitor might be reinstated, another competitor might be disqualified or in exceptional circumstances results for a course and classes, might be voided.

3. The protest is upheld, but there is no change to the placings.
This is perhaps the least understood outcome.

The jury may agree that something went wrong, perhaps the organiser failed to comply fully with the rules, but nevertheless decide that there is no fair or rule-based way of changing the competition results.

In other words:, winning the protest does not automatically mean receiving a different result.

The jury has to consider both what happened and what remedy, if any, the competition rules allow. Sporting fairness is the guiding principle.

Example 1 – your SPORTident card fails

SPORTident problems are one of the more common reasons for questions at download.

The starting point is competitors are responsible for punching at every control. If a punching unit is not working, or appears not to be working, the competitor must use the backup provided. Rules state that a competitor with a missing or unidentifiable punch normally cannot be placed unless it can be established with certainty that the missing punch was not the competitor’s fault. In that exceptional situation other evidence may be considered.

Organisers must provide a backup punching method,  for failure of either the competitor’s control card or the punching unit.

For SPORTident AIR+, the IOF MTBO Commission recommends competitors carry a second SI stick as a backup in case of failure of the primary SI stick.

If the primary SIAC does not contain all the punches, a competitor can request that the backup SIAC be downloaded. If that backup SIAC contains all the punches in the correct order, the competitor can be ranked.

So imagine that your main SIAC stops working halfway around the course, but your backup SIAC records the remainder of the course correctly. This is precisely the type of situation for which the backup system exists.

On the other hand, simply saying “I know I went to the control” will not normally be enough when the electronic record is missing.

Example 2 – the whole control is missing

Imagine arriving at exactly the right location and finding that the entire control has disappeared – the stand, control flag and punching unit are all missing.

If the entire control assembly is missing, the organiser has clearly failed to provide the control as required.

A competitor affected by this should report the problem as soon as possible and if necessary, make a complaint. The organiser would then need to investigate what happened, for example, whether the control had been removed, knocked down, stolen or misplaced and determine which competitors were affected.

The difficult question is not whether something went wrong. It clearly did. The difficult question is what can fairly be done about the results.

If only one or two competitors were affected, it may be impossible to reconstruct exactly how much time each rider lost searching for the missing control. If many competitors were affected, the fairness of the whole class may be compromised.

This is a good example of why an upheld complaint or protest does not automatically produce a better placing for the competitor who raised it.

The organiser or jury may conclude that:

• the complaint is justified because the control was missing;
• the event organisation did not comply with the rules; but
• there is no fair and reliable way to adjust individual finishing times or placings.

In a more serious case, if the missing control materially affected the fairness of the competition, the jury has the power under the rule s to require broader action, including voiding the results of a class.

This is therefore a strong example of the third possible outcome: the protest may be upheld, while the competitor’s placing remains unchanged.

Example 3 – taking the wrong map

This example illustrates why responsibility matters.

For an individual interval-start race, rule state that the competitor is responsible for taking the right map. The competitor’s number, name or course must be indicated on or near the map so it can be seen before starting.

So if you simply pick up another course’s map, ride the course and later discover your mistake, a complaint is unlikely to overturn the consequences because the rule expressly places responsibility on the competitor.

The situation can become more complicated if the organiser actually supplied the wrong map or if another competitor had already taken yours. The organiser guidelines acknowledge this problem in relays: a competitor taking another rider’s map can result in that team being disqualified, while the innocent team left without its correct map can create a much harder fairness problem – in an extreme case even raising the possibility of voiding the relay.

That is exactly why complaints and protests are considered on their particular facts.

Missing punch does not always mean equipment failure

Competitors should also understand an important distinction.

Rules state that competitors who lose their control card, omit a control or visit controls in the wrong order must not be placed.

That is different from a genuine equipment failure.

The IOF guidance recognises that punching disputes can range from a clear case where one rider has one missing punch and nobody else experienced a problem, through to a situation where a large part of the field fails to register at the same unit.

Evidence matters.

A simple way to remember the process

Something went wrong → Complaint → Organiser decides

If you accept that decision, the matter ends there.

If you do not accept it:

Complaint → Organiser’s decision → Protest → Jury decides

The IOF describes this process as a way of providing a transparent and documented decision-making process when competitors believe that rules have been broken or the competition has ceased to be fair.

The important message for MTBO competitors is that making a complaint or protest is not being difficult or accusing an organiser of wrongdoing. It is the mechanism provided by the competition rules for dealing with genuine questions about fairness and the application of the rules.

Equally, a successful protest does not necessarily entitle a competitor to a better placing. The jury must establish what happened, determine how the rules apply and then decide what action, if any, can fairly be taken.

So if something unusual happens during your next MTBO race, keep calm and raise the issue promptly with the organiser.

The rules provide the process from there.