In the Doug Lampkin event report from the last world round in Duluth USA, he says he made an error that basically cost him the event, and Fuji, also said he would of made the same error but saw Doug get a five for missing the marker.

In the US nationals and our club events we use markers with arrows on them to indicate which way a class should go round or over an obstacle, they could be one or two of these markers or four or five.

It wouldn't be hard to write on the section start card the number of splits a class has.

All the start card needs is section number and champ class 3 split markers, expert class 2.

Nothing worse than thinking you just cleaned a section only to find you missed a marker and got a five.

Just a thought Stan the van man came up with as we were marking out this weekends trial.

As an aside, the French seem to have a very good system where they can actually mark five routes with very little confusion. A case usually of less is more! Quite often the easy route has a begins and an end thats all, perimeter marked with tape.

The best split markers that I have seen were at the Youth Nationals, TTC. They use an 8.5 x 11 cardstock printed with a red arrow on the left side and a blue arrow on the right side. Every class was marked on every set of arrows to eliminate any confusion. Under each arrow were the class numbers that red/blue arrow applied to. Cards could be split in half to mark the outer boundaries using either the red or blue arrow.

We use 6 x 12" plastic card coloured red, blue, green and yellow.

A split section starts with a normal set of start cards the main route (usually clubman route) is then marked with red cards to the right and blue to the left. When a hard route split arrives the red and blue are laid out with two green cards off to the right or left showing the start of the hard route split. The hard route then continues with green cards on both sides until the routes join again where the last green cards are placed with the red/blue to show the riders they have rejoined the main route again. The same thing is used for the easy route but yellow cards are used instead of green.