carealto wrote: ↑Mon Apr 01, 2019 2:53 pm
Oh, and while i am ranting, is there any support for a limit to a competitors number of results challenges? Perhaps over a season (they do it in other sports) - it feels as though some people have a "challenge everything" approach to results
In the vast majority of cases the paddler putting in a protest firmly beleives that they are right.
If it were the case that most protests are from paddlers fairly sure the penalty is valid but just testing the system to see if they can get away with it then I would agree that we have a serious culture problem that needs to be tackled, but I actually think this is pretty rare, based on the emotion I see from paddlers when they find out they have a penalty that they subsequently protest.
Racing is quite psychological, and the psychology can affect the paddlers, parents and coaches making it difficult for anyone to take an unemotional view.
I have known paddlers and parents protest a penalty out of a sense of righteousness even though having it struck off would not have changed the placings at all, they only have a few minutes to decide whether or not to protest and sometimes it isn't long enough to unemotionally consider the bigger picture.
Sometimes paddlers and parents do not completely understand all the rules. One of our div 3s told me at the weekend that she had been given a 50 on a gate she thought she was in and only touched because the pole brushed her cheek, so I explained that half head is anything less than a whole head from the neck up, and then she was happy that it was really a 50 (no protest).
Of the other penalties I saw people discussing at the weekend I think only about 50% were protested in the end. I'm sure there were many others that were simply accepted.
So no, I don't think we need to mess around with the rules about protests.
Possibly we need to educate parents (and some coaches) to emotionally support paddlers better and help them make objective reviews of their runs.
If anything the thing that is probably leading to more protests than previously is the amount of parental video feedback. Some parents run down the side filming, others film from a fixed position, but it is extremely rare that a parental video will capture a similar viewing angle to the one the judge had, and a lot of times telephoto compression makes it impossible to tell whereabouts the paddler is upstream or downstream relative to the position of the gate. That is why at div 1 and prem there always 2 or more judges on each gate with different viewing angles.
I was amazed that at a different event recently a paddler had a protest upheld who had talked to me about it first and showed me the parental video. The video taken from maybe 100m downstream at high zoom did clearly show that the paddlers head had been in left to right, but I had been perched a few metres upstream shooting stills of other paddlers and recalled that I hadn't been sure if the chin had actually been downstream of the gate when the head went to the right, in fact I thought at the time that if it were me, I would have spun around for a second attempt to make sure. I knew the section judge had a clearer view of that than I did being almost directly in line with the gate line so I advised that the 50 was probably right.
Clearly one of the judges thought the same as me, I can only assume the section judge was happy that the chin was in, but the video that paddler and parent used to convince themselves was from an inappropriate angle for the way the paddler negotiated the gate. I know this is not an isolated incident, it is simply a recent one that I remember clearly.
My main concern was that having what to me was a marginal protest rejected would have brought the paddler down, in fact because it was upheld the paddler went into second runs in a more positive frame of mind and probably paddled better as a result. So was the paddler wrong to protest? I still can't decide, I do think they were wrong to base the decision on the video even though it worked out.