Best Practice Blog: Dragon’s Back Race® 2022 Course Pivot

By Shane Ohly

Look out for our series of articles about good practice in adventure sports events. We hope that other organisers will find these articles useful and thoughtful, whilst also providing insight for our participants about the background operations at our events.

If you enjoy reading this, perhaps you’d like to join us at the annual Adventure Sports Events Conference where race organisers get together to learn from each other and subject matter experts.

Ourea Events are regularly described as the gold standard operator in terms of best practice in adventure sports events. I won’t lie – it is flattering and makes me proud to be part of a high-performing team of event professionals. In this short blog, I wanted to share an example of how we approached a challenging day of course management on the first day of the Montane Dragon’s Back Race® in September 2022, and how Command, Control and Communications (C3) systems combined with pre-emptive planning enabled us to pivot from plan A to plan B in minutes.

Let’s quickly paint a picture of what is happening. The Dragon’s Back Race® is epic by any standard, with only 24% finishing this incredibly challenging six-day, 380km, mountain stage race last year. We are 10 hours into the first day. The leading runners have already finished the 49km / 3,800m course over the hardest mountain terrain in Wales. Most of the participants are scrambling their way around the Snowdon Horseshoe, the final section of the route. This is one of the most spectacular mountain days in the UK, with impressive vistas and the famous knife-edge arête, Crib Goch. The overnight camp is a greenfield site with no power, water, internet or phone reception, so all these services have been built by our team to accommodate crew and participants overnight.

While Crib Goch is safe enough in fair weather, it is not a place to be during high winds or thunderstorms ©No Limits Photography

One of the key differences I often observe between good and poor event management is whether the organisers are planning their actions based on the forecast, or simply reacting to the weather they experience. All day there has been a threat of thunderstorms, plus a front of heavy weather due at some point later in the day. Depending on which weather forecast you want to believe, lightning is either certain or unlikely.

The situation at the Dragon’s Back Race makes for challenging course management. Based on the worst forecasts (thunderstorm, heavy rain and 60kph wind), we should close the course over Snowdon. However, the forecasts are mixed, and the weather radar shows that the front is still many hours away, as does the real-time lightning tracking data. However, if we want to avoid runners being on the most consequential terrain (Crib Goch) during the most serious forecast weather, we’ll need to take action at least 90 minutes before the weather arrives, to allow for the time delay from the previous manned checkpoint, where we can redirect the runners. Throughout the afternoon, the arrival of this severe weather slowly moves from mid-afternoon to late afternoon, to early evening. We keep kicking our decision down the road, with weather reviews taking place at 90-minute, then 60-minute, then 30-minute intervals.

We have a very capable team of event staff deployed to the Snowdon Horseshoe. This includes various mountain professionals and some highly experienced volunteers. We have our own wide-area UHF radio network working through our own repeater so that we can talk with all the staff deployed to the hill. We also have two satellite internet systems supporting VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and WIFI communications and internet access. In reserve, additional people from the ‘Course Operations’ team are standing by, as are our own emergency Response Team. In summary, we are well resourced with layered ‘Race Control’ C3 systems to coordinate everyone.

Our goal in Race Control is to enable as many participants as possible to experience as much of the course as possible, without exposing them (or our staff) to unnecessary risk. This requires nuanced course management.

We review the weather data at 18:30, again 15 minutes later and this time there has been a sudden change in the ferocity of the forecast wind, with gusts jumping from 65kph to 80kph. We double-check our Severe Weather Management Policy, which, given the terrain (Crib Goch), pushes our decision firmly towards a major course intervention based on the wind speed alone. Just at this moment, lightning flashes across the horizon, and the hill-based staff are immediately on the comms, reporting the incoming weather. We know the thunderstorm is still 100km away from the real-time weather data, but the storm front of wind and rain is bearing down. The back markers are on the most serious terrain of the entire event. We pivot, enacting a plan we have been rehearsing all afternoon, and immediately close the course.

The Safety Team on Crib Goch role changes from passive support to active intervention, as they gather the last participants on the ridge and head down the trod to ‘stretcher corner’, which is the fastest way off Crib Goch from their location, and often used by Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team. Meanwhile, the Snowdon Summit Course Ops Team head down to Bwlch Glas, rolling up all the participants between the two locations. Within 20 minutes, we have everyone (staff and participants) grouped together, supervised by our team and pushing down the mountain to return to Pen-y-Pass. There isn’t a textbook for this, but if there were, we would have just executed a textbook close and collapse of the course.

But not quite. The participants that had already passed the summit of Snowdon have been allowed to continue despite the deteriorating weather because they will soon be heading down off the mountain to the Overnight Camp, and this gives the maximum number of runners the opportunity to complete the full course.

Not quite, because as darkness envelopes the mountain, the back marker becomes disorientated and slows to all but a stop as he searches for the path in the dark. We are watching him on the GPS tracking as he falls further and further behind the remaining runners. We know that slow, tired, cold runners only get slower, colder, and more exhausted. We provide some advice by phone and deploy our Response Team to retrieve this runner. It’s been a long and exhausting day for everyone.

The GPS tracking shows how the event unfolded

I always feel nervous recounting a story like this when I know a serious incident could easily occur despite everything we do to mitigate against it. Luck plays a part. However, I do hope that this blog provides an insight into our event operations and will be useful for other event organisers.