Fits the narrative pefect. Code are back after a season a little off the pace.
No surprises with Alex’s success. He has been very competitive for a long time and works hard at it.
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He’s riding the R series too, no fancy tempo lookalike.
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Sure about that?
In the video Tibby said he rode a sub 600 prototype (~100kg) in M2M, likely for M2O as well
Could still be on the new mast with the old foil
11 AM, Women start. 5 minutes later, Top seeds and unescorted riders start. 5 minutes later, unseeded and escorted riders start. 5 minutes later, all wingers start.
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Definitely not production foil. I don’t even think they rode production foils last year.
James explained the reasoning on the podcast.
I think the reasoning is generally sound, which boils down to the following (based on memory, form you own view)
- Something is better than nothing, and the sooner we have something out, the sooner it can be improved
- The sport needs more events and more attendance and more coverage, and they need more of the top riders attending, who need to be incentivised to travel
- The Hawaii events can be the “final crown jewel” event, much like the triple crown of surfing. They can also be seen as a niche event, that brings out the best “specialists” much as the Pipe masters + big wave events have always done, with a few locals competing only in those events (ala the local channel crossing specialists).
I agree with all of this. but unluckily, you can see where this has ended up.
- Unfortunately Edo can’t travel while he figures out his residence stuff (he discussed with GFP)
- Unfortunately Kane had a shocker in Aus, so didn’t feature going in.
- “Unfortunately” Kai has been on great form and sweeped the off island races.
- You’re left with what looks like a relatively arbitrary set of results going into Hawaii, instead of a nail biting finish.
I think the only thing i’d suggest for now, is to rather make the Hawaii races the start of the tour, rather than the end. That way people all get their due ranking, and need to travel to defend it.
James asked for feedback here, it would be great if everyone could share their perspectives
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Yea, I listened to that. Totally understand and applaud Casey’s intention here, but the execution feels overly simplistic and weights participation too much in my opinion, ignoring all sporting convention. In addition to weighting depth and competitiveness of field, maybe average the top results (2, 3, 4?) results for each person and toss the others? That would prevent people from having to travel to all the races, and would avoid some of the issues you cited.
I couldn’t find the link you posted previously. Thanks for putting that up. I encourage others to share thoughts there.
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Yes the implementation lacked any nuance at all, but it also was something for people to react to, and someone to complain at, both necessary steps.
I found a nice balance requiring 6 pro level events to top a ranking, every finish earns placement points, weighted by how competitive the event was and faded by recency. 6 was the tipping point for the current crop of events, hopefully that number starts to increase!
Funnily enough the overwhelming sub-current that I’ve been hearing is not that the rankings are bad (that is obvious on first pass), but more the point that no one knows who anyone is (“Micky: who tf is Tibs?”). I think better internal PR among pro riders to amateurs like us is an oversight, and I felt that maybe that is something the riders can do better to push their own agenda, getting it known they are competing etc. Bootstrapping Drive/Ride to Survive (whatever the TdF was called), but for foiling
since you have some knowledge of cycling, I think the ranking system used on road-results.com is pretty solid and adds an element to racing. You accrue a ranking based on your top 5 results within a 12 month period. Each result is graded by quality and you are scored for your individual performance in any given race. The intent here is different from what James is doing, but the methodology is similar and its fun to figure out how you stack up in your local area, region, country, and against the people you compete against most frequently (nemeses), etc… Winning a poorly attended local race might give you the same points as a top 25 finish in a national race, etc (which seems fair to me). Not perfect, but its an interesting model.
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this looks perfect, thanks. The ranking + data wrangling looks very much exactly what I’m doing:
Road Results - we wrangle data so you don’t have to
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This is what happens when everything has moved to social media and each rider is only yelling into his own vacuum. Have you ever tried to tell anyone your username in real life? Nobody knows who your username is.
Downwindworldtour, or whatever it is, will have the job to inform people. The best thing is, people are arguing. Without the argument, there is no sport.
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I’ve only been a fly on the wall for some of these types of conversations between runs with the Oahu crew. But from what I’m hearing, it has been really difficult for the riders to figure out what is coming from gear and what is coming from rider. That’s because all they have to go on is km splits, but every single day is different and even time of day (tidal action) matters a lot. Can’t compare km splits on Maliko to China Walls for example. And depending on the tidal currents and the ground swell, splits change a lot.
It reminds me of how the America’s cup sailing races matured over the last 50 years into a technological contest. At some point, all competitive teams pretty much had to build two identical boats and staff two crews for training. The only way to evaluate changes was to go out with both boats side by side and see which is faster - so they could neutralize all the variables coming from wind, sea state, etc.
Increasingly, I think we are going to see the teams that train together rise to the top for exactly this reason.
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My understanding is that many of these guys often do mock training races with eachother and are commonly trying eachothers gear. Agree that there are too many variables to compare km splits reliably, but they shoudl be able to compare performances against one another to glean some understanding of performance gains from equipment. They are sponsored riders, so they are obviously going to keep it on the DL, but I think they know.
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Join by using this ZOOM link Launch Meeting - Zoom
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Live stream
Insane domination by Edo. Dope finish, surfing most of the way.
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