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Rant Throw/No Throw What drives this sport are ideas. Money doesn't hurt either, but it is the energy of ideas that moves much of what we do. Today's Reader rant is brought to you by the Sailing pro Shop. Have an opinion that you'd like to share? Send it in. I've long thought that a class which has a throw out race (or races) in their continental or World Championship is lame. (There is a big difference in a casual beercan series or the like because you are trying to encourage participation on a local level, and people travel a lot during a month long once a week series) Why reward inconsistency? Farr 40 class, while maybe no perfect in some respects, at least does not have a throw out race for the Worlds. Beyond rewarding inconsistency, I think the bigger issue is having a throw out race lets some competitors take higher level rules risks than they would otherwise - they have a foul to spend, so to speak. It also allows for the last race match race between the first and second place boat - the old Silversti-Bertrand issue from the '84 Finn Trials. I think it might be an interesting discussion for you to inspire. You have come to have a nice way of framing issues like this, and then sticking a poll question at the end. In a perfect world, I think it would be really cool to set up some sort of grid (not a full excel file) that each class could simply add their name too, and whether they allow throw out races or not. Maybe Dawg has a solution to how to input this info so that it doesn't get redundant (if it was left to the masses, you'd have every class zealot responding on behalf of their class, and the grid would become cluttered and useless). This is something that US Sailing should do in this country - and ISAF globally - but they don't. One more way to show the government as lame...Comments? Peter Huston 03/14/07 |