Sports Class Growing Pains

Sports class is growing up. Sports regionals are a gre= at success. People come with all sorts of gliders. The atmosphere is relaxed. Time-limited tasks mean that pilots new to racing do not face years of land= outs on hopeless assigned tasks. <= /p>

Sports nationals are going strong too. The last two na= tionals have been filled months ahead of time. The level of competition is high. But success has brought some growi= ng pains and interesting questions about the future,.

There always is grousing about handicaps. When Karl Striedieck won in an ASW27, there was a lot of “I can’t be competitive= in this old thing.” Dave Stephenson and Tim McAlister demolished this th= eory by winning in a Foka and a Libelle, and nearly winning in a KA6. Some pilots now complain that high performa= nce gliders can’t compete.

Overall, though, most pilots grudgingly admit that the handicap system works pretty well. It slightly encourages lower performance gliders, which is probably good. It may penalize open class a bit too much, which is unfortunate since they have fewer opportunities to race, but they aren’t complaining loudly enoug= h to change anything.

However, you have to understand that the handicaps are= only fair in a broad average sense. Lower performance gliders will land out more often, so they must do better on good days. If a contest has consistent weathe= r with light winds, the low performance gliders will dominate. One or two extra da= ys of iffy weather, big holes to cross and stronger winds, and the higher performance gliders will dominate. There is inevitably more luck in a handicapped contest.

Proposals have been made and tried to refine the handi= caps, perhaps making them vary by day or thermal strength; or to call separate ta= sks for different groups. None of this as yet has seemed worth adding to the already troublesome complexity.

Tasking a competitive sports class event is a real challenge. Sports started with one task: PST. Pilots hate the PST. Among ot= her problems, it encourages boring short trips around a few turnpoints close to= the airport. But calling a fair a= nd challenging task with a big performance spread is very hard. You can’t let the 1-26 sit on the home ridge or go up and down one cloudstreet while = the Nimbus has to cross gaps, holes, and lakes. But you can’t force the 1= -26 to land out either. The main answer is brilliant task calling. This has lar= gely been achieved in the last several nationals, but we should all appreciate h= ow difficult it is. There is som= e move to tasking based on a 1.0 (standard Cirrus) handicap, and too bad if that is too much or too little for your glider. If that ever really takes effect, though, I think it will face a lot of resistance from pilots.

We use sports nationals as a qualifier for the increas= ingly popular club class worlds, which only allows a narrow range of handicaps. S= uggestions to similarly limit U= S sports nationals are routinely made, but don’t really make sense. By my count, only 6 out of the 50 gliders that participated at the last sports nationals would qualify. The vast majority of these pilots = are simply not going to come if they have to find or buy another glider to participate. Europe has a lot of clubs t= hat own fiberglass gliders, a lot of club members who want to race and do not o= wn gliders, and many serious racing pilots who own and fly club-class gliders. We have = very few of any of these.

Another suggestion is to allow all to come, but to lim= it team selection to pilots who come with a “club class” glider. The danger is that club class migh= t then become a “specialist” class. With less appeal and a small pool of talent, the US would send teams that do dismally in the worlds and attract less interest at home.

Team selection always involves a tradeoff between pick= ing the team most likely to win, and rights of= pilots to be selected for the team. For example, anyone who has been= to an FAI world championship is now excluded from the US club team. This enhances t= he rights of less-experienced pilots to go to the club worlds, perhaps gaining experience, but we clearly ar= e less likely to win than if, say Karl Striedieck or Doug Jacobs were to go. If we limit selection to “club class” gliders, then we go further in this direction. The vast majori= ty of pilots are simply not going to leave their ASW27 or KA6 at home, and spe= nd 10 days flying a borrowed Standard Cirrus, even if they can find one. Dan Cole wrote a nice compromise p= roposal, available on the US<= /st1:place> team web page, that we include handicaps somewhat broader than allowed in c= lub class, but not everyone, which is where this issue may end up.

The issue is a bigger one, really. The profusion of cl= asses means that most pilots now fly contests based on geographical convenience and fun, rather than driving all over the country to where “their” conte= st is this year. The sports nati= onals in Pennsylvania had 39 modern 15 meter or standard gliders, including 16 ASW27/Ventus 2. As= I write, the 15 meter nationals in California has two pilots from East of the Mississippi out = of 29. Clearly, the vast majority of national-level East coast 15 meter pilots chose to fly= at Mifflin rather than spend a week driving out to Montague. Just as clearly, = none of these pilots can be chosen as part of the next 15 meter team.

This increased flexibility is great for national-level= US contest soaring. But it means that under the current scheme, all the world teams will draw from a very small number of people. Whether that is desirab= le or not is something the teams will have think about.