Thank you so much for being part of history in joining us at the first-ever Road Relay event at yet another iconic venue – Calder Park Raceway.
As we’ve mentioned before, a written response on our part to the survey data isn’t a regular occurrence – we communicate with our members when we think it’s necessary – when a lot of you have the same questions or comments, or in the case of XCR at Calder Park, a new event, which naturally brings with it opportunities for improvement.
First of all, we’d like to say thank you. The survey responses we received from this event were constructive, generous, and courteous, giving the impression that respondents trust we are listening to their opinions (we are), and we’re so proud to be part of the Victorian athletic community.
We understand and expect that a new venue will bring unforeseen challenges, and while we’re delighted with our first event at Calder and with having another cross-country racing option, we’re nevertheless motivated to improve the overall racing experience for our athletes.
We’d also like to mention that feedback from the venue was that Calder Park was left in a very clean condition post-event, with very little rubbish left behind. As the organisation hiring the venue, Athletics Victoria values these positive relationships, and the behaviour of everyone attending our events plays an important role in whether we’re welcomed back in the future. Thank you for helping us maintain that reputation.
As an aside, we also like to acknowledge everyone who attended our recent event at Cruden Farm. We know that we impressed upon athletes the need to be especially mindful of the venue, its staff, and other users, and you certainly delivered. We received no negative feedback from the venue, and we could tell from the Cruden Farm survey responses that you had been attentive to this.
Thank you for taking that message on board. Your actions don’t just reflect well on Athletics Victoria, they help build the trust and relationships that enable us to return to these outstanding venues in the future.
Please read on for our thoughts on some of your survey responses:
Parking at AV events is usually good. This time, parking was more difficult, with a line of cars on the highway, queuing to get in. Exiting the venue was also an issue, with long wait times.
This was the comment we received most frequently. We were unaware that there would be an issue of this extent and apologise for the inconvenience. In the event that we return to Calder Park, we will employ dedicated traffic management, explore extra entry points, and work with the venue to establish dedicated car parking areas for our event.
The car park was a little too far away to carry our equipment to the track. There appeared to be plenty of room for us to drive closer to drop off our marquees.
This is quite possibly due to a lack of knowledge on our part of how an unfamiliar venue operates. We’ll add this to our notes for next time, and it may form part of our traffic management, if safe to do so.
There weren’t enough toilets for this event – only one set.
Upon inspection of Calder Park, we considered that there were sufficient toilets. There were two toilet blocks (one on either side of the lane to the start/finish area), and we placed signs to those designed to be visible as patrons entered from the carpark. If you missed those on the way in, it may have been confusing coming from the other side. We’ll know where to place signage to the best advantage for next time. It’s also likely that Calder Park staff were not aware of the specific needs of athletes beginning a race all at once, or close to it. Our communication to them will be clearer next time. As to the need for portable toilets onsite – that’s something we’ll look into.
We’d prefer not to race on a Sunday – and not this late.
As we’ve mentioned, the move to Calder Park was necessitated by Sandown Park having only one date available – the weekend of the Gold Coast Marathon, a clash we’d like to avoid. Similarly, Calder Park was unavailable to us on a Saturday, limiting our choices. It’s worth noting that there were some respondents who were happy with the timeslot; however, the competition for dates and venues continues to make scheduling our events a complicated juggling act.
We have noticed that the ladders do not include results from the most recent event; could you put ‘provisional’ ladder results on ResultsHub for XCR?
ResultsHub is a bespoke live results system that has been developed for Athletics Victoria since 2019 to support the unique scoring requirements of both XCR and AVSL. It has significantly improved the accessibility and timeliness of competition results compared to the previous process, where ladders and results were manually produced and published as PDF documents.
Regarding the suggestion to publish provisional Club Premiership and Champion Athlete ladders, this is something we have considered. At this stage, however, we have intentionally chosen to only publish ladders once results have been finalised to avoid confusion for clubs and athletes.
Following each XCR event, result queries can be submitted up until 5:00pm on the Monday after the event. The AV team and our results provider then review any queries on Tuesday before finalising the results and updating the ladders, which are typically published on Wednesday. We encourage clubs and athletes to raise any result queries on event day where possible, as this helps expedite the finalisation process.
Publishing provisional ladders before this review process is complete creates the risk of clubs and athletes viewing standings that may subsequently change due to corrected results. We believe it is preferable to provide one accurate, final set of ladders rather than multiple versions throughout the week.
Unfortunately, last weekend we also experienced an unexpected system failure relating to functionality that had been operating reliably for more than three years. We have since been working with our developer to identify the cause and implement improvements to further strengthen the stability of ResultsHub. Athletics Victoria is also continuing to investigate alternative live results platforms, including Roster Athletics and AthleticsLive, to determine whether they may provide a more sustainable long-term solution.