The Publisher
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Apr 22, 2010, 11:24 AM
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Re: [The Publisher] Redress sacrificed on the almighty altar of television
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OLYMPIC MEDAL RACE AND TELEVISION
By Paul Pascoe
Following the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece, where there was very little coverage of sailing, there were three requests made to ISAF from the TV Producers that led to the development of the Medal Race in sailing, and its introduction at the 2008 Olympic Games in Qingdao, China.
1) The first was that people only want to watch "finals", so TV are really only interested in televising the last race live, and sailing had previously scheduled several events final races at the same time. So the first request was to reschedule so that each final race was at a different time (easy done!).
2) The second request was that they wanted to see the winner of the Gold Medal cross the finish line in the final race, race their hands in triumph and celebrate as is the case in every other sport. The requirement was not that they win the race, but that they be on the race course and cross the line with the commentator saying things like "AUS needs to finish better than 4th to secure the Gold Medal", which is similar to what happens in the Decathlon where an athlete needs to "finish in under 4:15 to secure the Gold Medal". It was never a requirement from TV that the Gold goes to the winner of the medal race. This led to the change that you could not drop the last race.
3) The third requirement was that "we don't want to have to wait five hours for a protest hearing before we can pronounce the winner".
To accomplish this third request, direct on-water judging was proposed for the Medal Race. Obviously this is difficult in a fleet of 30 Lasers, so a manageable number of 10 for the final race seemed a reasonable compromise. However, that then meant that if a person was more than 10 points in front, they couldn't be beaten assuming a DNF was only 11 points, so there was lots of discussion regarding what should a DNF be scored, or if there should be some weighting on the Medal Race scores.
Yours truly went and rescored the previous three Olympics with one race to go, and in only one occasion (2004 470 Women) had a team been more than 20 points in front going into the last race. Triple points was a strong contender but it was felt that this would be difficult to get through politically. So double points was introduced and unfortunately as is always the case, at the 2008 Games another team (470 Men) finished more than 20 points in front, but were still required to sail the race which they did and duly won, so the TV guys were happy.
However, it had been decided that even though there was on-water judging, that competitors should still be allowed to submit a request for redress. And of course, there were duly two requests for redress on Medal Races in 2008, with one that could affect the medals in the 49er. So unfortunately for two events in 2008, the final results had to wait for protests, defeating the whole purpose of the exercise.
I believe the latest ISAF decision to deny redress (for specific events such as the Medal Race) is therefore just a push to try and get the results to be decided on the water rather than in the protest room, with results flashed up onto the screen immediately and not something that says "come back in three hours, or maybe tomorrow when we might have the results".
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