Scoring in Paragliding Competitions: A New Pilot's Guide to the GAP Formula & Strategy | Joerg Ewald

Hello and welcome back to Paragliding Atlas. I'm your host, Aninder Singh. And if you have been liking what's coming your way so far, then make it your mission to make someone else's flight safer as well. So feel free to share this with your friends and family who share the skies with us. And if you want more of this, then don't forget to hit the subscribe button. For today's episode, we have none other than Yorg Evald. Yorg, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Hello. Yo, I have heard about you from YouTube where I was trying to decode the algorithms which decide how many points go into

making of a champion. So like that is the simplest way I can, I can describe this. But for for our viewers who are, you know, have recently started flying and are not from your era, can you give a tiny bit of introduction? Well, OK, I started flying in 1992 as a young student and it took me about 10 years to discover competitions. So I only started flying competitions in 2002. Joined the World Cup the first time in 2004 and stayed there until I retired from competition flying in 2025. Years ago on the side, I got involved in scoring because I started my own Little League in Northern California in 2001 or

two. And because of that, I wanted to know how scoring works and stayed involved with it. And then since about 2011, I am the person who is managing, maintaining, further developing the software that is creating the scoring for us. And because of that, I also had to develop an understanding of that algorithm that gives out the points that makes champions. And I've been involved in creating updates, changing it, making it better over the years. And yeah, that's still my involvement. I still work with the PWCA and with CIVL, the two world bodies on the scoring topic. I advise federations, I score. I'm a race director now in Switzerland, so various touch

points with the whole making champions. Yeah. And I can only imagine the amount of experience and the wealth of knowledge that comes with it, which is also the reason why I was very excited to have you on the show. And finally, I think after exchanging emails over back and forth over a few months, we have finally made it happen today. Yeah, usually, you know, the first thing that comes to my mind is that anybody who is into IT or computers or especially softwaresimtalkingaboutthe.com boom. When anybody and everyone who was with computers just got rich. Softwares is usually one of those things where you know these days piracy and all of those illegal downloads are more

or less becoming a thing of the past and people are making fair bit of money with softwares. So my curiosity is that is this finally that one business model or something in paragliding where the creator is getting rich? Like has somebody actually managed to get rich from softwares in paragliding? No, it's still, I mean, I do this as a hobby. I, I do get paid a little bit for doing the work I do for, for various associations, but that is just to pay the expenses more or less. I have a daytime job and that's what feeds me and gives me a roof over the over my head. The rest is just for fun.

OK, well I hope that gets better and you can live off softwares and be a part of the Silicon Valley. But anyways, how did life look like before we had such automated solutions? Because I do remember some of my, yeah, old timers telling me that people used to fly with GPS cameras and they used to take photos and what was. Not even GPS. So when competition started, and I have to say I'm very lucky, I was not really doing, I was not doing competitions then because at that time I don't think I would have enjoyed it. I probably would have stopped doing it right away. But yes, people were flying with

cameras and they had the basically the control zones, the turn points they had to take were specific buildings or mountaintops or church Spires and things like that. And they had to take pictures of those things, come back to goal hand in their camera. And then the scorekeeper was actually developing the film that the pictures that they took. It was developed overnight and then they looked at on the negatives. Is this really that you're inspired or is it maybe the one a village over, depending on that, decided if somebody completed the course or not? And yeah, that's how winners were made. That's in the old days. I remember it because my dad was a sailplane pilot flying

competitions and there it was exactly like that and paragliding copied that initially and then only when GPS came out and we started having those handy little handheld GPS devices, people start thinking of how could we use those and spare ourselves the the hassle of the camera work. Is is that also coming in from sailplanes? Because they obviously would have thought about GPS as well. Yeah, but actually the way the scoring works now is very specific to paragliding the the way we do the scoring. It was invented by three hang glider pilots. You know, Hang Gliding. Paragliding belongs together at the world level. There is one association.

So these three guys, they developed the first version of the scoring formulas, throwing algorithms that is taking into account that you can track a pilot at that time it was maybe every 30 seconds. By now it's every second and have much more information about where they are and what they do. And based on that, we developed this formula that we have today, the the gap formula as we call it. Does does GAP stand for something? Yeah, that's the first letters of the three names of those three guys. Oh yeah. Justin. Gilles, Angela and Paul, Angelo and Paul. OK, and these guys were just like some geniuses or just regular pilots who decided to

find a solution for. They were pretty bright. Technically interested hang glider pilots, yeah. Would love to have them on the show if possible. Some of them are no longer around. I could imagine, I could imagine, but anyways, we thank them for their contribution and we thank you for joining us to explain their contribution. So you're. OK, I'll. Do my best, you know, to to let our pilots know who are listening to us, who are yet to race in their first comp. What is a comp looking like? What is the task? I've heard the word task so many times. So what? Yeah. Exactly. So what is a task? How do we race?

When I explain that usually I draw this analogy to sailing regattas. So similar to a sailing regattas, what we do is we have to follow a predefined course and whoever flies that the fastest is the winner. That's the very, very simple, simplistic view on it. There is a little difference to sailing and sailing, unless you have a major, I don't know, your, your mouse breaks or something, you will probably make it to goal. Whereas in paragliding competitions, it's not a given that you make it to goal. Yeah. OK. So basically it's just like, you know, going around a controlled area rather than. Just yeah, exactly. And the way it works is the task

setters in the beginning of the day, they basically define a task, Say we start here and we have these three areas and then we have the goal here. And they say you have to fly to this cylinder here or just circle from above, then to this one, then to this one, and then to goal. And they give us a time when we are allowed to launch. So probably can't write my hand, read my handwriting. And then the start, actually the race start is in the air. So everybody has time to go high, put themselves in a good position. And then at this predefined time, the start opens and then everybody can start racing the

rest of the course all the way to goal. But as I said, you have to You always have the risk that you plight like light, you find the next thermal and maybe you missed that thermal and your flight is over here so you don't make it all the way to go. I feel the pain, York. I know the pain and I'm pretty sure you feel it. To everybody. Everybody. Yeah, but that's part of the the learning curve. The The hard life of a compilot watching the lead gaggle fly over you because you were too ambitious to try and outcome. Them that's one way to do it, but the other is just seeing the

lead gaggle from far from far behind disappear over the horizon and then sinking out. There's many ways to do that, but yeah, that's one of the things where we are different from the sailing regardless. OK, Bjork, There's one another task type that I've heard about here and there at times and it's it reminds me of cycling, you know, especially Tour de France, which is like right through this course as quick as possible, but in a single pilot format. So time trials have been a part of paragliding more or less. But like, when do time trials come? Were they popular? Why don't we see them very often?

Or what's? Let's talk a little bit about time trials in. Yeah. OK. So yes, you're right. There are time trials. So what I described just now is the general format and we have two ways of doing that. And the one that we are mainly familiar with, the one we see mostly is the format we call a race, and that's a mass start. So if we say this cylinder here is the start cylinder, then everybody gaggles up here, waits, and then at the predefined time they go forward and race towards goal. That's the race. And the one you mentioned, now the time trial is 1 where I don't wait until the start time

comes. I have the option to start whenever I feel it. So it's individual time. My time counts. Whenever I want to start, then I go. I go and store my my task and everybody else does it at their own time. This has a little bit of a bad reputation, and that goes back 20-30 years ago because for some reason these tasks, time trials were only set in bad conditions. Yeah, we can't really do a race. It's we don't have the time for everybody to launch and get high. So let's do a time trial. And that way time trialer for a lot of people are associated with bad conditions, maybe questionable safety,

questionable sportive conditions. And that's why more and more people try to avoid them. They are interesting because they are totally different. They require different tactics. And especially for a beginner, they can be really interesting because like you said, you see the OR like we talked about before, you see often at the start, right away you see the top pilots disappear. They fly away from you and they're gone. And that reduces my ability to observe them and learn from them quite a bit. As soon as it starts open, they're gone and I don't see them anymore. In a time trial, I can set myself the the objective to

start early, maybe before everybody else, and be already somewhere along the course line by the time the main gaggle passes me. So by the time we're flying together, I'm already halfway through the task and I'm in a different position. I have a different set of challenges around me and I can see how they do that. So the learning experience for me is better if I'm in front and let them catch up with me rather than them flying away from me at the start. That's why I think time trials are really interesting. And yeah, I mentioned it before. I'll be race director here in Switzerland for for the next

year and I already promised my pilots that we will set time trials every now and then next year. That's exciting. And has it been tried in World Cups and Cat 1 and stuff like that as well? Of course, yeah, it's it's every now and then. But as I said, usually when conditions are bad. Alright. And, and it's for some reason there doesn't seem to be 100% fairness because I don't know how the start window works in this one, but if somebody you know takes off at a cycle or during the time of the day when cycles are stronger, then they get more advantage than the one

who went in earlier, so. It basically goes back to the original thinking of what are, what are we doing? It's we still call them cross country competitions. So it's about being able to charge the conditions and make the right decision at the right point in time to maximise the day and make, take the yeah, make the most of it. So, yeah, you, you, you have to make more decisions yourself because in the race the start time is defined, somebody else made that decision. Then is when everybody starts. And in the time trial, there's this added complexity that you, you decide yourself, but you, you win a little bit more

freedom also to, to, yeah, choosing a different time. And maybe it's the better one than everybody else. You get away. OK, OK, York, I want to clarify some abbreviations for our viewers. It's just so that if we use them. Later. Have we cleaned this up in the meantime? Go ahead. Yeah. So you know ESS and triple S and there are quite a lot of such abbreviations which I see when I open up X contest. Could you talk to us about the most commonly used ones that people see on their X contest screen as soon as they open up the interface? OK, now let's do this little sample task again.

So we have to start and we have a turn point. Sorry, in German it's the same word and I am still keep mixing them up. We have launch and we have to start and we have the first turn point. We have the second turn point and we have goal here and this one here is what is called ESS and the start is sometimes called SSS Triple S. Why is that? Like I said before, we launch and the clock is not running yet, so I'm not racing yet. I launch and I have time to put myself in a good position. This is the start line. I can cross it as many times as I want before the start, but I

have to be inside of the cylinder at the start time and only fly out after the start. But that's the start of what we call the speed section. This part here from the start over the turn points to this here, which I explained in a second. That's called the speed section. That's where we measure how fast are you. What happens before doesn't count for your time. What happens afterwards doesn't count for your time. So, but this year, the speed section, that's the part you need to fly the fastest. So this is simply the start of the speed section. And this year is the end of the

speed section, ESS. That's where we block you. That's the time you get. But you still have to fly to goal, otherwise you will not get your full points. But again, you can do that on your own time. This is not timed at all. What counts is the speed set. Yeah, thank you for explaining it so well. This is like so much easier to understand with the diagrams and it feels like intuitive learning. York, I'm I'm glad you mentioned points because to me when I open up PwC websites or or something like, you know, where the results are mentioned, there are, I don't know man, like leading points, distance points and speed points.

And like how many types of points do we have? Or how many points, how many type of points do we really need to figure out a winner? Like why can't it be just like go to point A to point B and the fastest fastest guy wins? The answer for that really you, you should ask that those three guys who invented Cup, why they did that. I mean, I have some neat ideas why they did that. But yeah, that basically goes back to them. Before, when everybody was flying with cameras, it was just the time you took from the start to the goal. If you didn't make a goal, it was the distance.

But yeah, it was a little simpler at that. What we have now is basically in one task, in one race, we play 3 different games. We have three games where we can make points. The first game is the distance game. Whoever flies far the further gets more points. And of course that's maximized. When I get to goal, I cannot fly further than goal. So then I have the maximum of the points for distance. That's the game #1 the game #2 is flying the speed section that we just looked at, flying that as fast as possible. The faster I fly it and make it to goal, the more of those.

We call them time points. You get the time points, measure how fast you fly. That's the second game. And then the third game is you mentioned them, the leading points that goes back to when GAP was invented is originally it was really something very specific to Hang Gliding competitions. But by now we have them everywhere. But basically that game right now measures how much progress you make, especially in the middle half of the task and compared to everybody else. And again, that gives you points. If you do well in that game, you get more points. And then in the end, your your task result is the sum of the

points you made in those three games. And because we have those three different games, it's possible that the task winner is not the fastest pilot. But the one who just had the most points in all three games together? This is very interesting. So game one is distance that is making it a goal. If you don't make it a goal, the penalties will pretty much make it senseless. This is not really a penalty. You're just, if you don't make it to goal, you don't get any time points and that's really the the big portion. Yeah, yeah, like you, you miss out on something which will will make it worthless, correct. The second game is speed, which

is like how fast and who leads. So basically there's incentive. I don't know, somebody labeled it as incentive for risk taking. I don't want to, you know, put it in some things. But yes, incentive for being courageous and looking for terminals rather than just following the third game that you mentioned. I do not understand that which was I think. You're just mixed up the two. So the second really is just about speed and especially if you consider what we talked about before the the time trials, it's really just how fast do I manage to get from the start to the end of speed section. But that defines how many points I get, regardless of whether I'm

the first one doing it or the last one. OK. What was though? That's the speed and the last, the third one, the third game is what we call the leading game. It's the the leading points are given there and that measures how fast. Basically, we have this curve here. So if this is the task distance from the start to ESS, and so the more closely I follow the optimized route to make progress along the optimized route, the more points I get during this middle. Yeah, about 50%. That's an additional way of, yeah, of rewarding fast pilots who fly in the front. And as you said, it's it's, it's

encouraging people to not just hang back and observe others and be one thermal behind. It's to encourage people to be the ones who go out and find the thermals in the front. But you have to be able to do that consistently. You really need to fly out a certain, I don't know, one thermal lead over the rest to make this count and make more points, really noticeably more points than everybody else. Oh yeah, I was actually curious that how big of a difference, Like let's say if you can see a pilot 10 meters in front of you, is it making a huge difference? No, no, no, no.

It really is like I did some simulations and it starts getting interesting when we're talking kilometre or more. And so really it's like when I was flying, it was always the, yeah, if he's one thermal in front of me, it's probably going to gain more leading points than me, so I have to try to close the gap. But once you're always more or less in the same thermal, then it doesn't matter anymore. Oh wow so like lead gaggle, you know, because these days we have more than like a lot of times more than half of the field is landing within 5 minutes. But let's say the 1st 20 or

first 30 pilots who are coming in to land in goal, are they more or less having same leading points? I mean if they have managed to stick together for the race. If they always stick together, then yes, they will have the same. But yeah, the differences then are very small and that's what exactly what you see in those races, like at the World Championships where there was this huge gaggle flying the whole course. Then their differences are very minimal in terms of leading points and time points. So they're very close together in the end. I remember this discussion that we were having at PwC Macedonia where Maxine was crushing the

day for at least the 70% of the task until he like finally bombed out. And that was task too. And he there somebody said that you have to attack him from the below because if you let him top out the thermals, he's just going to keep on like, you know, he's not going to give you time to breathe. He's going to go hit the core, top it off and boom. But the only way to counter that is to not give him time to breathe, which is like go, go, top it off and then. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's really, really high, high top level. It hardly gets any more top level than him and Onoha.

They really have that game down and it's it's basically then it's no longer about the flying technique or any like that. It's just a mind game and it's just in the air.

People who start flying, who do their first competitions, don't worry about that, really slide to goal. That's the only thing that counts. Yeah, I mean, but dream about it. Maybe one day it will count as well if you work hard enough. When we talk about those three games, that's always how basically people who start out, I say play one game, start with the distance game, that's all that matters. Everything else, it doesn't matter. Because if you try to be fast before you can go far, you will not get anywhere. And so, yeah, the first, I don't know, few races keep getting better. Try to just fly as far as possible and celebrate when you

make it further than before, celebrated when you make it further than your colleagues, celebrated when you make it to goal and only once you make it consistently the goal. When that's basically not an issue anymore and you're truly going to make it to goal and like 80% of the tasks, then try to speed it up. Try to be fast. Not only make it there, but also be quick and once you're there, you basically automatically with the lead gaggle and then you can start playing the game about leading points and not waiting for them to fly out, but try to fly out front, try to win the

lead in front of them. That's a natural progression if you start worrying about optimized lines and leading points before you even make it to goal consistently. Usually pilots like that they, they get, yeah, frustrated and stop, stop with the sport eventually. That's a shame. That's not a good thing to happen, considering how beautiful and fun it is to race with more than 100 humans in the sky. I find it. I find it fascinating here. I mean, imagine, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. But on the other hand, if you set your goals too high, it's like with any sport, you have to really see the progression. Otherwise it's just a mountain you will never be able to get

over. And then you turn around and you go home. And so I think that there is you'd really need to have the right mindset and be aware of we have these three games and let's start with the first one, the simple one. The others ones will come over time. Out of the other two, which is basically speed and leading, which is more or less your ability to go on full bar and control and keep the wing open and still make tactical decisions. You know, because if I'm wrong. Flying fast doesn't mean flying full bar. Flying fast means flying efficient. Not losing time in weak thermals when there's better thermals, Not losing time getting into

thermals until it climbs. Finding to the yeah, flying directly to the thermal rather than flying somewhere and then starting to look for thermal while you're low. Knowing when to stop and turn and make altitude and when to say, oh, there's something better in front. I keep going. That is what makes you flying fast. And then the, the, the thing with the speed bar is really just the cherry on the cake when when you have mastered that part and you consistently fly into a thermal, top it out and before it gets weak, leave it and go to the next one. That's when when your speed over the course is high. So it's not about being able to

fly top speed in between for 5 minutes and risking the your wind blows up and you need to go down on the reserve. It's about being able to keep a high speed consistently throughout the whole race. And that is, yeah, using thermals. Well, not losing time in thermals. Thank you so much for clarification. I did had that idea in my mind, but maybe I was not able to portrait very clearly in my words. But it seems like this is such a deep topic that we could have an episode for every single one of these, you know, priorities that. Yeah, I mean, that's what what you say is.

It is exciting because there's so much room to to start out small and become better and better and better. That's what's so fascinating about it. OK, York, I I really want to look at an example of a real world com, but we'll we'll get to that later. You know, before I, I want to ask you, let's talk about special cases. We have metrology, we have, you know, other factors. We have Level 3 calls for our viewers. Level 3 is basically when the pilots say that the atmospheric conditions are becoming too dangerous to be in the sky. Level 1 and level 2. Level 1 Is is not normal or how does that work?

Well, we we say level 1 is yeah, is nothing is nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. I'm happy flying level 2, it's it's demanding but safe and Level 3 is it's getting to be unsafe or there already is unsafe. That's basically that system was introduced to make it simple for pilots to report back their view of the conditions. Because as an organiser, as a race director, you have this situation where you make a guess on how things will be. You set a task, you send everybody out, and then they're spread over quite a big area. And you can't be everywhere. You, you have to basically start collecting information.

And the people who are best suited to give you the information are the pilots themselves. But if you, everyone of them was, yeah, giving you a verbose information about how they feel and how that last thermal was and how the wind is and all, we would never end. And so that's why we introduced this level 1-2 or three. And by now there is even apps where our pilots can tell us right away with one click on the phone what the level is they they experience. And we even see where they are when they report that. So we can complete our picture of the environment like that. What app is this that I'm not

aware? Of oh, that's something we have for the Swiss, the Swiss competition. Share it with the world, Sir, Make it a better place. Or is it your copyright or you want to keep it secret? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's something similar is going on with the new trackers. You can do it there in the World Cup with the old, the fly master devices that were live tracking, you were able to give feedback there. So being able to not only tell pilots that the task is stopped, but before that ask pilots for feedback on what is going on is really, really valuable for for the the race director who to

judge if the situation is still safe to continue the race or talking about special cases, decide that the race is stopped. That's basically he has only two options, right? He can, when once the first pilot has launched, the race is on, it will run. And the only thing he can do is let it run until everybody's on the ground or he can say the race is stopped now and then, Yeah, everybody has to decide on their own if, where, where to land, what to do. But the race is no longer running, so there's no point in pushing forward anymore. So when the task is stopped or

the race is stopped because of a Level 3 call, that means everybody gets 0 points for that day. Nope, no, no, we got over that. That was for a while, especially in the laps time. I, I was in the World Cup once where I was leading in the laps time race and then they stopped at 5 minutes before we crossed the goal line. And at that time in the World Cup, a stop elapsed time was still a zero. I was not happy. And then we changed the rules, made some adjustments to make it possible. So even stopped tasks even elapsed as time trials, stopped time trials can be scored.

So no, we don't throw that task away. We, we score it. We just look at, apart from everything else that we look at, how far did pilots get, how fast were they in goal to determine how many points we hand out. We also look at how basically what degree is the task already decided. You know, when 90% of the field is already landed and the field is really widely spread out, we say, yeah, that task is done. That wouldn't have changed much if we had it let it run to the end. So we score it very highly. Whereas if everybody's still bunched up in one thermal, everybody's still flying, then

we say, well, that was not decided yet. So we can't really give that task too many points because things could have changed considerably if we hadn't let it run. And so we are just like that, but we still score the task and give points. Just out of curiosity, I believe a lot of this is software controlled where there are set algorithms for calculations and formulas which decide who's getting. So it's completely fair, you know, nobody can point out discrepancies in the system where it favours 1 pilot. But I mean it could be a type but like one specific pilot. But let's say when the human element comes, so how much of

this there is a human element? Like for example if we have to say how many decisions are being made by human which could actually cause some sort of a favourism if if at all. You mean in the final results the the the scores that pilots get in the end? More or less for example, this day that you're saying if the field is spread wide or the field. No, that's all calculated. There is 0 human human factor in there. That's all math. So yeah, apart from penalties. Penalties are usually defined by the race director and there, yeah, some, there's some human factor there. They may decide it's a 0 for today, or they may decide, yeah,

we we just cross out 50% of the offending pilots score. But that's really the only place where some human interaction takes place and affects the score. Everything else is purely math, purely calculated based on the track that we receive, of course. So ultimately, it is the pilot's actions that create the tracks that create the score. I was literally going to come to that next, like the track that is the key here, you know? So yeah. Has it ever happened just out of curiosity that tampered tracks? Or can they be even tampered by somebody learner or somebody deeky? Where? Yeah, not so easily because I mean they are the ITC files that everybody uses that we also

upload the next contest for, for our cross country flying. In theory you would be able to put different to yeah, put different coordinates in there because all they are is every lines as this is the point where this pilot was at this time at this altitude. So you could change that. But the effort to do that is really high. And the files themselves have some temper proving inside. So with as soon as you change 1 digit in there, the scorekeeper will get an alarm when you try, when he tries to evaluate that file and he will not accept it. So of course there have been attempts to tamper, but those were usually found out.

Of course, we only know about the ones we found out. On the other hand, my theory is our sport is happening in closed space. We usually we see each other. So if suddenly somebody is supposed to have won the task when everybody knows, well, he was flying behind me the whole day, that will come out. You cannot cheat yourself in front by modifying your task or for a rear track final sort I. Mean that's what I'm wondering, like how would you cheat in this? Like would you reduce the timing that you have compared to the other birds? No, you can't. You basically have to give yourself a different position all along the flight so that you

end up being goal faster. Yeah. Interesting. It's really and the top of that, there's just nothing to win. So why do it? We do this for fun because it's exciting. Even in the World Championships you will not win more than a flower pot, so why would anybody want to do that? Oh man, that just sounds very sad a world championship and a flower pot for a price for fuck's sake that has to change. Let's talk about the rule breaches that one might encounter such as early start or you know, missing the turn point or you know, the out of task cloud flying airspace. So just like what is unsupported behaviour in an in the air and

on the ground? Nothing like. OK, So what? The points you mentioned are not really unsupported if I start too early. Remember the task from before? Let's put it like this. Like I said, we start for a race, we are all waiting here and yeah, it can happen that somebody gets so excited and forgets that the start is at 12:30 and they cross the line at 12:29 and then fly the whole task. And sad news, they only get scored for distance from the start to from launch to the start.

Let me put this another caller. So they get scored for this. If they jumped too early, they do the start. If they notice it, if they notice it out here, come back and then fly the task, they get scored for the whole distance. But if they start too early and then fly it all as far as they want, they only get scored scored for this party. But that's not a rule breach. It's just a mistake the pilot made. And it's the same thing if they miss a turn point. So if they turn around too early, like now let's put it here. If instead of going all the way, have one track point in the IGC

inside the cylinder and then go back. If they instead turn around too early, then the distance only counts to this point because they didn't get into this control zone. So we only count them to this distance. And even if they fly further all the way to goal, that doesn't. They don't get scored for that, they are only scored to this point where they missed the turn. Point the the distance is like let's say it would be tiny, right? Nobody would do this deliberately and even if they do miss, it would be off by like few 100 meters at Max or like less than 50 meters or something so.

Yeah, we've had cases of 1m. Sounds like a heartbreak for the pilot. Yeah, yeah, it really hurts you also as a scorer if you have to give somebody a bad score because they missed the turn point for 1m. But I mean, we have a tolerance in here. We actually don't measure exactly at this. We give you at least 5 meters and if it's big cylinders even more where we say, well, if you got it wrong for whatever reason, usually the yeah, your, your instrument calculated the distance a little different or whatever, we give you really a margin of error and only if you're outside of that margin of

error, then yeah, sorry, you didn't make it there. So we can't score you for the whole way. It happens not so often actually, these instruments are quite good. We record a point every second. So before when when we started out with GPS, the the memory was so small, we only had a point every every 30 seconds. So it could happen. You went in and you went out and while the time you during the time you were in the instrument didn't record a point, so you were not in the turn point, supposedly that could happen at that time. But nowadays, where we record everything in one second, that

mess, that doesn't happen. Just to illustrate this example better, let's assume that you are going to get 100 points added to your task score when you actually cross the line. But if you miss it by 10 metres, can you give an idea? Like how many out of hundreds? Do you still get it really depends on where you go because like I said, we play the distance game. We now talk about the distance game and it really depends on which turn point you miss. Because if you flew already, if you flew already to here, but you miss this one, you already covered quite a bit of distance.

So you get all this distance and you get the distance points for that. But if you miss the the first one here, obviously you covered less distance until you made that mistake. So you get to accordingly less fewer distance points. So let's say there are two turn points, and then there's start, and then there's gold. So if you go to turn point #1 you miss it. You go to turn point #2 the points that you get is for the journey from start gate to turn .1 or just till the start gate. No, all the way to here. OK, but then no further because you're supposed to go inside the cylinder.

You didn't, so that's the distance you get. So whichever turn point you missed, the distance point stop there. Yeah, exactly. Makes sense, I thought that it is. You are just missing out on the few meters that you're missing from the points from. Those, No. Then you can actually calculate. Well, if I don't fly all the way there and maybe sink out, I turn around now and I just miss a few. Yeah, yeah, This point, Nope, you have to go in, otherwise everything you do afterwards is pointless. Got it, the tolerance. This happened with me in PwC Macedonia where I had gliders above me, gliders below me with a separation of almost 100 to

200 meters. So nothing too huge that it could create a false perception. But I clearly saw some wings turning before me at the same turn point and some wings turning after me at the same turn point. But my I turned when my instrument said that yes it is checked. So why what is happening here? So there are several factors playing into it. One is your GPS and the other pilots GPS. Even if you put them in the exact same spot, they may still have different positions up to 2030 meters difference. And if everybody flies by their instrument, it doesn't matter that they they they sit apart a little bit because you still

have to cover the full distance. But yeah, that can lead to that situation that you describe where you're 500 meters to that point is in a different spot in the real world than the other pilots. So they turn around quicker. But the other thing is that for I talked about the tolerance and especially for big cylinders, it used to be, we changed that a little now for this year. But it used to be that this tolerance zone that we created to make it sure that different softwares still see you in inside the cylinder. It could be a few 100 meters, let's say 100 meters. And this is something we created.

So pilots could go right here and be safe even if their instrument showed them. Yeah. So as soon as the instrument showed them that they were inside the cylinder, they could really rely on that. The scoring software would also see it that way. But now what we saw is that pilots know about this tolerance zone and actually turn around here trusting that they don't need the tolerance, that their position will be accurate enough. And turns out our instruments are so good that yes, indeed, most of the time we don't need the tolerance. And that's why we made it much, much smaller. It will not go completely away,

but it will go towards the five meters I mentioned before, even on big cylinders. And then, yeah, it doesn't matter anymore where you turn. It's everybody's at the same time. But that's something we really observed a few years back. The tolerance was even double what it was now. And that's when we saw people start playing with that, turning early, winning, you know, up to 200 meters. I mean, if you turn here instead of here, you win 200 meters on the people who fly actually into the cylinder according to their instrument. But doesn't the instrument give you a ping or something which is a necessity to target because? Yeah, there is intern

instruments who actually also know about this tolerance and allow you to burn early and tell you you got it. God damn I never knew this existed. OK is that is that where tech doping might come into paragliding? That's a very like I never thought paragliding. It's it doesn't hurt to know about all your equipment and how to best use it in competitions. Once you're at a certain level. No, don't. Don't worry about that when you're still playing the distance game, but when you're really already pretty good and the speed game and starting to get into the leading game, then things like that can be important. Got it right. You're, you know, before we move

on to the last part of the show where I really want to zero in on like the balancing of competition tactics and postal safety and sportive risks versus transported risk. I want to tell our viewers that how are rankings and daily scores calculated? Because we do have handicaps, we do have MRT and then we do have like discard or some of all like FTV, which I've heard. So let's let's try and give our viewers an illustration of these terminologies. And to our viewers, if you have any questions, please do feel free to reach out to me or York because this is a bit of a complicated topic and things can arise.

Or feel free to drop in what you think in the comments below because we will go ahead and check that as well. But yeah, do you want to share your screen, York? Yeah, I'm working on it 2nd, so here we go. I feel like we are going to open a Pandora's box of WPRS. This has been the biggest mystery of my flying life. Yeah, let's let's keep that to the S rest. So that's the going to be the dessert. Let's start with daily scores. So like we talked about tasks, we talked about the three games we play and at the end of the day, at the end of the task, we get a task result.

And what we show here, I hope you can see it, are the task results of the, I think this is task one of the World Championships. And yeah, like you say, you, you look at this and yeah, what happened, what what was going on. So let's look at the information here a little real quick. In the front part is quite understandable. We have who is in which rank? What is their pilot ID? Every pilot has an ID, so we know who we talk about, male or female, the nationality or Collider or they fly, who are the sponsors. That's all the pilot information. And then we come to the race and we mentioned it before, we

explained how we count the time from the start to the end of speed section. So here it's only 1. So it's start of speed and end of speed section. So we see here this pilot started at 1330 and actually if he looked down, they all started at 1330 because it was a race. So the start time for everybody was 1330. And no matter how much later after 1330 they crossed the line, the start time for them is 1330. And then we see for every of them when they actually crossed the end of speed, that's the cylinder where we stop the time and then they still have to fly to goal.

And here you already see something interesting that about this 2 is in second place. He was actually 76 seconds first before on over at the end of speed section. Why didn't he win? Remember, we play 3 different games. So yeah, the the next column just calculates end of speed section minus start of speed section. So we see how long they actually took for the speed section and we calculate how fast they are on the speed section. So we see here the average, the speed of, but this was 28.52 kilometers an hour for the speed section. How far did he get? Now we're looking at the distance game 67.3.

Of course, everybody else we see on this screen also, because they all flew into goal and that's the maximum distance you can fly. And now we look at the points. Now we look at the points of the three different games. We have distance points. And again, because everybody here on this screen flew the same. There is further down there the people who didn't make it into goal, but everybody who flew to goal, who flew the 67.3 kilometers, they get 542.3 points. So they all they have the basically they all win all together. They all win the distance game. There is no distinction there. Now let's skip over this one and

look at the speed, the speed game, which is expressed in time points where the faster pilot is the shorter the time for the speed section, the more points they get. And we see here up this he got 327.7 and Onora who was 7 seconds later, he got yeah, more than a pointless, so 326.4. But we play a third game. We were we play the leading game and that's the the middle column here. And here you can see that while Baptist won 111.7 leading points, somewhere along the way he must have fallen a little behind Onura. Onura wins 115.2, and then when we add up those three points, Onura still has 2.2 points more

than but this and wins today. Does that make sense? It's fascinating and I'm finally like able to read a score sheet from a paragliding competition. So yes, OK it makes complete sense but that is like so damn close I can see a difference of like almost a few meters is costing a task win. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's we, we don't really know. And that's that's kind of where the third game is really complicated and technical. The leading points. We don't really see what happened and why Unova has, yeah, 4 points more in leading than than everybody else. What happened there? I mean, we can only imagine.

Or we can go back on the track, the the the tracking and replay it and see how at one point he got a big lead, probably right about in the middle of the task where it counts the most. He of course at the level he is flying, he knows that he knows exactly when is the right moment to go out and create the lead like that and then allow the gaggle to catch him again, fly more relaxed all the way into goal, even allow somebody else to pass him in the end because he had that lead in between. But that's really like top, top, top level.

That's not everybody will fly like that. Wow. OK, so this is basically your individual score for a day. Correct. Yeah. Should we look at the cumulative score at the end of comp and maybe then we can also talk about discord? So that was about the the individual day tasks task results that we looked at and you asked us about the competition results. So now let's look, take a look at the competition results of that same competition, actually the World Championship in Brazil. And these are the results after 8 tasks. How do I know that? I see here it goes from T1 to T8T8 is the last task.

So there were eight tasks flown. And we see that it's not just the numbers, the scores of the tasks. These are the numbers we saw before of task one. Some of them are crossed out, sometimes we have other numbers in there. Why is that?

In paragliding at one point we decided that we give people a chance to become a champion even if they have a bad day. So we introduced the so-called discard system where it'd be bad days get crossed out and only a part of the scores that you actually fly count towards your final score. The way this is calculated is mathematically beautiful, but not so easy to understand. I usually give a one hour lecture on that alone. And that's what you see here basically is when the score is completely crossed out, that means it's one of his worst scores and it's completely crossed out. He totally discards that.

And I mean, here it's it's amazing. But this his his worst score is 705. His second worst score that he completely crosses out is 949 out of the thousand. That is amazing. And whereas Honora he at least yeah, he had really a bad day the last day he only made 260 point that they probably didn't even make it to goal, but it didn't count for him. He crossed that one out and that's how he still won the silver medal. And then we have those tasks in between where the original score is crossed out and we see a lower score that actually counts. And that's one of the specialities of this discard

system that we use, FTV, where partial tasks can be discarded. That's what's happening here with T4 for both. But this stand on over they discard a part of task 4. So instead of 952 it only counts nine 798.9 points. That's the number that is not crossed out is what? How much counts for that thing? I didn't understand this York. Why is talk? Sorry. OK, so let's look at just Baptist. Task 2 is his first task, so that one he crosses out. His second verse is task 8, He completely drops that. His third verse is task 4. Every pilot has a certain number of tasks or partial tasks they can discard, and because he

already used 2 full ones, he cannot discard a full task anymore. So he only discards, I don't know, maybe 10 percent, 50% of task 4. If you want to more know, know more details, then let's do one on the on FTV. But like I said, it's about an hour and you need to do a little bit of math in your head. Yeah, maybe we can save that for some other time, but just for our listeners who are watching, do you coach regarding this or do you educate people regarding this as well? Yeah, yeah, I do some, yeah, mainly of course for the space pilots. But I've also been doing this in

online lectures for, for other federations because yeah, know how for that is important, is crucial, and it's not very widely spread yet. So I do what I can to make people understand how that works and how their scoring works. Got it. So if anybody's interested, they can basically get in touch with you on your. Absolutely, Yeah, I love to do that. Sometimes I do it in competitions when I used to compete still there's a rainy day in the basically every competition. So I will do my my presentations there and nowadays I can do it online. That's easy. Got it. So we'll drop in your details, contact details in the show

notes below. But so task 4 is basically something complicated that happens in parallel lighting and it is eventually. That's the simplest way for me to understand it here. That is the only thing that makes sense. So, but OK, but why are three tasks discarded out of eight? Like what's the point of having a task if you're in a cut of three anyways? Like, you know, that's a lot of effort and money being going into. Three, yeah, but if you look further down, it's not the same tasks for everybody. Like here in 13 place we have Yajek and he had a really good day on the task 8. So for him, task 8 actually

counts. So it's not the same tasks that get crossed for everybody. It's really the worst that get crossed that day on task 7, but task 8 counts for him. I'm just saying to bring down the cost because costs are such a huge thing in paragliding. And why do we have 8 days when five are anyways taken? Like why do we even discard? Look at him Darko, he had a bad day on task 1. He bombed out 233 points. Basically if every task counted, he could have gone home. After that he travelled all the way to to Brazil. But the first day adjustments were not done properly, didn't really feel comfortable,

whatever he didn't fly well. And after that, if every task counts, the the competition is over for those pilots who didn't make it to goal. But because he knows that his worst task will be crossed, he can continue and push. And yeah, he has another one where he did probably even made it to goal. And in the end he's 12th in the world championship. So I think in an amateur sport where people do a lot of this on their own money, on their own time, giving them some way of, yeah, if if you mess up once or twice, it's OK, you can still be with the top people.

I think it's fair. It's a It's a good approach. OK, York Handicap, is that a part of the system? Because scoring has like some sort of a handicap? I've heard sometimes that has been a solution to equalize the field. So what? What is handicap in scoring? We in the official in, in gap in the formula we talked about there is no handicap. So whatever you see in some competitions about handicaps were like lower class wings get some kind of bonus, some kind of support. So that is specific to those competitions and usually means manual work of changing the comp, the results after they come out of the scoring software

including MRT. That's what you mentioned before where lower class sliders don't have to fly all. They basically have a slightly different task where all the turn points are bigger so they don't have to fly that much distance. We discussed once introducing that in the scoring software, but in the end there's it didn't happen and it's not something CIVL, the World Organization or PwC. On the other hand, they they don't see a need for that. So it's probably not going to happen anytime soon. The gap is the software that you mentioned, right? The app is the formula. There are several software systems that implement that formula. The one I work on the the one I

maintain is called FS or FS Flight. There are a few others, but yeah. Just out of curiosity, are these available in public domain? Like if I want to for example put out a sample task for myself practice, you know there is a cross country place that I I'm going and I want to have a sample task and I want to practice 8 days in a row. Is it possible for me to just download something which has gap, upload my track logs at the end of the day and have a proper set pattern to observe after 8 days? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, all, all, most of those scoring softwares are freely

available and certainly the ones supported by CIBL because they, they do that, they, they invest in those to, to support the sport. So they're freely available. OK, that's good. It's just when you train yourself like that, I mean, the, the what the FS mainly does, what those scoring do is ranking pilots based on their on their performance all on the same day. So for individual training, it's probably not the best tool, but organizing a little competition on your home hill with your friends, but definitely there's a lot of people who do that and then score it in FS. Now we looked at the task results, or let's break it down

even more. We looked at the three games we play, the distance game, the speed game, the leading game, and all this adds up to the task results. And then we have the competition results, which are formed from those task results. And yeah, something magical weird happens in there to cross out some of those at the end of the competition. We have competition results. And if the competition was previously announced in the proper way and was accepted as an international competition by CIBL, then it can be uploaded on this website that CIBL runs on civil comps and enter into the world pilot ranking system, which means that every pilot who participated in that competition

automatically gets scored in the world in this world ranking gets points there. And that's where we see not only the the results of one competition, we basically see who is the best pilot over WPRS looks at the last three years. So over this last three-year stretch, who is the best pilot? And you can break it down by also juniors, female pilots. You can break it down by continents, even your country. So who is the best? Yeah, Norwegian pilot in the world ranking. And you, you can rank yourself like this. I'm Indian York, just to let you know. Yeah, but you live in Norfolk. It's not that. Yeah, but they don't give me the

sporting license, so I still compete under the Indian flag. OK. Yeah, well, I get it. I get it. Thank you for the clarification. OK, so you're, I think more or less we have given people everything that they should know to have their first comp at least. Way more than that. I would be scared if they used all of that. No really I think the the main point is don't race. Fly as far as possible and start about thinking flying fast once you have the first game down and everything else will come naturally and you'll pick up a lot of those things. You don't need to worry too much about those technicalities.

That's the beauty of it. Yes, it's complicated, but the computer does all the work for you. It's all about having fun, enjoying and learning, progressing, and yeah, that's all. There it is. That was so beautifully put. You know, a, a philosophical thought comes to my mind when you were speaking. That is, racing and paralleling is a journey, not a race. Beautiful it is if if you take your whole career, it is absolutely a journey and you you start crawling, you're happy to actually make it up in the first thermal before the start and maybe bomb out right away. Done that plenty times. And then you get more and more

and you get further and further. And in the end you, you race with the best with on around and at least you race with them in the World Cup. And it is probably as achievable as in hardly any other sport where within, if you really put your mind to it and work on it and progress properly after a few years from somebody who has never raced before, you will be able to race in the World Cup with the best in the world. And that's another part that is, for me, was always very, very exciting. I want to share an experience that I happened before we close for the day.

York. This PwC was my first more or less like a gaggle flying experience. I mean, I've flown in crowded places. India anyways has a lot of people. And during the summer season, it's it's peak, including the tandem. Then you throw in everything. It's it's madness. But this was the first time I was, or maybe, yeah, like one of the first times that I was racing shoulder to shoulder with some of the top pilots in our sport and almost, OK. I never made it to gold on any of the days, just to clarify. But I I bombed out later and later, you know, like there was a day when I bombed out after

the second thermal and then there was a day I bombed out of the halfway mark or something. But then a few weeks later I went to Bulgaria and took part in a friendly comp like Cat 2 where like let's say there were only two submarines and the total field was like 30 pilots. So you know what the level is. And I landed 1st and goal on on task one.

Yeah. And one could assume that if you had not had the experience in Macedonia before, that would not have happened. I beat the submarines and the Enzos. York 2 submarines and Enzos were behind my triangle and XL. Seven fabulous. You know what I'm saying is prioritizing comps is very important because it's a lot of money, investment and emotional, you know, surcharge that is associated with it. Because everybody wants to stand on the podium out of the 120 at the start line, but only three will get a chance and 10 will the the others who get to stand by the side of it. So a pilot is looking to fill up his racing calendar and they are

just starting out in the circuit. How would you tell them to prioritise the comps? Because WPRS is acting very pilot quality heavy, You know, it depends on who's racing where and how many. So let's let's just talk about prioritizing and picking and choosing before you go racing. I think before you do that you have to decide what are your goals. If your goal is to just have fun and you don't have a long term plan, you pick the competitions by the places where you want to fly or where your friends go. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a really good tactics to have fun, fly a lot and learn a

lot. If you want to progress and you say, well next year I want to be able to take part in cat tools where this year they don't let me in because I'm not ranked well enough, then you have a goal there. I need to improve my world ranking to get into the better comps next year, the higher ranked next year and not cat ones. Cat ones is only world championship and continental championship so don't worry about those yet. So but all the others are cat tools. But cat tools the the popular ones usually the ones that draw a big crowd and also good pilots. They're usually overbooked so

they can choose themselves who they want. So they picked the top pilots in the world ranking. So they say we have 120 spots and they just go, they ranked, they look at the pilots that signed up and look at them how are they ranked right now in the world ranking? And they take top 120. And if you're not in there, you're out and maybe come in later, but your chances are small. So if you want to work yourself up to the top competitions, you have to work yourself up in the world ranking. And so you have to pick competitions where they're not too over your head and you will

end up pretty low in the ranking and not make any points. But on the other hand, also not too easy, not a thirty person competition where everybody bombs out all the time and you win, but you don't get any points because everybody else is ranked low. So you have to make that decision. And some of the competitions actually they are aware of that and they help you doing that by showing you what the quality of the pilots were already registered. What is it? So how many points can you expect to win in that competition that can help you judge a little bit. Should I go to this competition or to this one?

Well, which one give will give me more points? But then you're still you. You have to win to get those points, and that's not easy. Should we do a screen share and give 5 more minutes or should we save this for 2026? Let's do it 2026. I need to go home. I I can imagine you've been standing for so long so. That's OK. Okie, dokie, okie, dokie. Yeah, amazing York. What can I say? Hands down, my competition knowledge just got elevated to a whole new different level and. Mission accomplished. 100 percent, 100%. And what I want to say is that thank you for spreading out this good in the world for the past

few decades. York, the work that you put in for the sport is quite nice. And I would say that a lot of people don't know about the heroes who work behind, you know, the closed doors or something. So you happen to be one of them. It was an absolute. Fortunately not always behind closed doors. So people, I get to work with people also as a race director or even when I scored. So yeah, people are aware of me. But yeah, it's a different kind of work than saying it, designing a wing or whatever. But it all like one thing without the other wouldn't work. So yeah, Luke alone, yeah, great

wings, but no, scoring doesn't work. Scoring alone without great wings, forget about it. So it really needs everything. I would want to leave our audiences by saying that it sounds super complicated, but believe me, just like everything else in paragliding, competing is super addictive as well if you get the hang of it. So that's it from us for this time. Thank you for joining us and stay tuned. More episodes coming soon. Bye bye.

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