US rules had a "drop a day" provision, brilliantly worked out by John Good to overcome the obvious problems. It was optional. I thought it was great in addition to the obvious reasons because it keeps a pilot's interest in a contest. If you land out on the first day of the contest its no longer, well that's over let's wait until next year, and your 10 day gliding vacation is now just fun flying.

It died on the vine as no CD ever wanted to try it. I guess figuring out the existing rules is hard enough, nobody wants to try new ones. And pilots didn't ask for it. If you only ask for things in winter on RAS and don't pester CDs to try it, it never happens. Same thing happened to racehorse starts and an integration of grand prix type racing to US contest tasks. They were introduced as rules options after a RAS storm over the winter on how much fun it would be, then nobody ever used it.

John Cochrane