US team silence

Hopefully, US Team members will weigh in with a post mortem of the contest and their recommendations for changes in rules, preparation, and support. It has been suggested that some differences in our rules that our pilots can't adjust to when overseas is the cause. It will be interesting to see if any of the team pilots site a specific US rule that accounted for seven days of back page scores.

RO thinks there is an intimidation factor due to the greater amount of gaggling with its attendant close proximity maneuvering. But we get a lot of that here in pre-start gaggles, and one of the pilots had a previous life of yanking and banking an F-14, formation join ups and still likes to mix it up and try to pull some gunnery lead on other gliders at contests. Yet he finished next to last.

Although it's not in our rules, our CD's shun the long task calls common in Europe, and flying in tricky conditions with lots of lowish clouds, precip and weak lift.

And, to make it worse, five of the six pilots were "western" pilots and rarely have the chance to fly in these vital-to-win conditions.

As Kawa pointed out in his letter lambasting the contest directors at this WGC, the sport has evolved into a game of leachery complemented by intense use of Flarm for monitoring/chasing/vectoring competitors. Here we have very little of this.

Our best hope, for the immediate future at least, is for strong weather at future WGC's. My two silvers and an "almost" were at WGC's with great weather. Those with the tricky weather we rarely bother to fly in here found me grovelling on the back page.

Here's for booming weather in the Czech Republic next month. Go Team Go!