world champs review

onemanfanclub Posted: 3 September 2007, 3:58 AM   So some of the European countries don't want "World" races held outside of Europe because it would be too expensive for them to compete? I'm overwhelmed with sympathy. Perhaps we could pass the hat round here&Australia&Asia&North America to help them out.   onemanfanclub Posted: 4 September 2007, 1:14 PM   Women's top 20 now corrected, thanks James for your eagle eyes, and Bryan for making up for my lack thereof. I agree with many of you that for all the reasons discussed, ranking these performances just on placing is a huge simplification and limits the usefulness of the exercise, but not completely. Using margin to winner's time, or better yet % margin to winner's time would be more useful, but (A) required more research than I felt like doing, and (B) is itself not immune to distortion due to factors like race discipline, terrain, quality of the winners, amount of bunching/following etc. Perhaps the ideal would be some complicated formula that only a Trewin could understand... But what the media, potential sponsors, funding agencies etc want to see are nice simple numbers, the smaller the better if they're placings. I think you could use these top 20's to argue that our peaks are as high as they've ever been, maybe not getting higher but getting closer together. WE all know that's not even half the story, but when trying to get attention of the above groups it's more important to tell the truth as opposed to the whole truth. And I guess my main goal was to add perspective to NZ WOC results now and in the future. We tend to have high hopes for our reps every year, but then I think we don't always realise how good the results that come are (oh well, another result in the 20's...). I know I was guilty of this in Japan, Tania's MD result was an obvious breakthrough, and we enjoyed the team's qualifying race heroics, but at the time I didn't realise just how good (eg) Chris, Rachel and Karl's results were, ie not just THEIR best results, but amongst NZ's best ever. Just don't anyone think the message is "no need to aim higher". If the top 20s are going to be updated every year, I think we all want to see them changing from the top down ;-)   Michael Posted: 4 September 2007, 4:07 PM   There IS a complicated formula that I'm sure Blair understands. For the rest of us, it's sufficient to know that the world ranking formula provides a number which represents performance and takes into account the differing spreads of times that you get with differing disciplines and terrains. Unfortunately only the current figures are on the IOF website - perhaps the IOF has older figures somewhere - but I doubt they go right back to the 70's.   thomasr Posted: 5 September 2007, 12:08 PM   dont mean to make it seem like the list wasnt hard to make, but did you realise that almost all of the list is in the high performance plan? is that how little anyone reads that?   Martin Posted: 5 September 2007, 1:34 PM   yes   mal g Posted: 5 September 2007, 11:37 PM   AAAAH A breath of fresh air......................