2013 49er World Championship Racing Format and Scoring

Huw2 · 30 September 2013 13:15

Hi SUG Members,

I appreciate that some, probably many, will find the following not

to be of interest.

Jon & I have been assisting the scoring team at the 2013 49er

& 49erFX World Championships which concluded yesterday 29th
September 2013. The scoring team worked through all the challenges
they faced in an excellent and well thought through way. I am sure
they wondered at times what was going to come next and how they
would solve the challenge.

The 49er & 49erFX World Championships 2013 were testing a new

racing format. These events have posed some challenges to a
scoring system such as Sailwave. So much so, each event had to be
scored using three Sailwave files, one for the qualifying series,
one for the fleet/final series and one for the Petite Final &
Final series.

**Outline of Racing Format**

The Q-series was in two parts, part one in flights with flight

reallocation (Days 1 & 2) and part two (Day 3) in ‘equal’
ability colour groups based on the overall standings at the end of
part one of qualifying.

The fleet racing (aka final series) was Day 4 & 5 of racing and

the sailors were split into fleets:

    Top 40 competitors overall at end of qualifying series were in

Gold (Top 20) and Repechage (next 20)

```
    form 41st overall after qualifying series the competitors were
```
split into Silver & Bronze fleets
After Day 4 the best boat overall from Repechage fleet was promoted
to Gold fleet and being given the same points scores as the last
boat in the Gold fleet for the Day 4 races. Similarly the best boat
overall was promoted from Silver fleet to Repechage and from Bronze
fleet to Silver fleet.

After Day 5 the similar promotion took place with

    best overall boat at the end of Day 5 in Repechage fleet is

prompted to Petite Final

best overall boat in Silver fleet to Repechage
best overall in Bronze to Silver
On Day 6 are the Petite Final & Final with the Petite Final
taking place first. The overall winner of the Petite Final is
promoted to the Final carrying forward F-series Net points.

The races in the Petite Final and Final score double points and
cannot be discarded. Petite Final 2 races of about 10 minutes
duration and Final 3 races of about 10 minutes duration.

Challenges Faced & Overcome

Because of the the two different formats for the Qualifying Series
this was consider as a Q-series and F-series, so that the points
scored in Q1 could be locked down once Q2 started due to Q1 being
with flight re-allocation and Q2 being in colour groups.

A separate F-series file was created by merging the Q-series and
carrying forward the Net points.

Day one of the F-series, scoring wise posed no problems.

The challenge was in promoting the competitors from one fleet to
another! The challenge was how to fix the scoring code point to the
number of competitors in that fleet for races on that day - a new
scoring code was created with method ‘Enter points by hand’. Another
effect which had to be accepted by the Jury as there is no way
currently of overcoming the problem, was that when rescoring the
scored points for Repechage, Silver & Bronze fleets change.

So far a way of having the F-series races and Petite Final &
Final races all in one Sailwave file has not been found. So if you
can think of a way, please let us know.

The last challenge was making an overall regatta ranking list
available to ISAF, with the added pressure that today 30th September
is the date of release for the new ISAF Ranking Lists. Jon succeeded
with a small caveat that points totals were not quite correct but
overall ranking order was correct. A major problem was sorting out
all the ISAF SailorID’s - about 38% of the SailorIDs submitted by
the competitors were wrong in the 49er class and 18% in the 49erFX
class. Regatta on-line entry systems should be encouraged to make
use of the mechanisms documented on the ISAF web site so that this
information is checked and corrected at the point of entry. Ideally
a second check should be done at event registration.

Thank you for reading.

Kind regards,

Huw

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