1000km flights

On Thursday, January 4, 2018 at 9:11:54 PM UTC, wrote:
Thanks for posting that Kawa interview. Competition dynamics has definitely changed since the days of Moffat and Reichman. Kawa would be considered a pussy if he had to race here during the late 70's lol. Its apparent he prefers short and fast tasks. Those type tasks may play to his particular skill set. In my opinion, that only "tests" one aspect of cross country competative flying. Another aspect is the ability to make critical decisions over an extended period of time and interaction with changing wx conditions along course. Those two aspects only start to come out during longer tasks as well as multiple days of longer tasks.

A decision needs to be made whether competition soaring is meant to be a test of "sprinting" ability or a test of "marathon" ability. Hopefully it will be somewhere in between, but lets not jettison the "marathon" aspects (both mentally and physically) of competative soaring.

We are talking about glider *racing*. The maximum difference between emphasis on "sprinting" and a "marathoning" in FAI (non-GP) glider racing is around a factor of 2. In atheletics it is from 10 seconds to around 2.5 hours and requires entirely different athletes. It is laughable to argue, simply because his experience indicates to him that oversetting task lengths leads to poorer *racing", that the man who is undoubtedly the most prepared, determined and obsessively competitive glider racer to have appeared would fail if the tasks were a bit longer .