Who was the second loser at the Europeans?

Christian's GPS screws up someone else. (Ager, Spain)

Gordon Rigg, who always enjoys a controversy, <<gordon.rigg245km>> writes:

Attila took third ahead of final task winner Mario Alonzi by just five interesting points.

Christian Chiech physically passed the goal line second on the last day, behind Mario but still half of a kilometer ahead of the pack, which was Attila, Alex, Martin and me.  For unknown reasons his GPS and scoring system put Christian behind us all in 8th place almost a minute behind his true finish position.  Initially Christian and the Italian team questioned this.

The tracks are available on the ager2010 scorers blog.  You can see his GPS is dropping out regularly on the flight and badly on the last part of the final glide.  I'm don't think the time data is in the kml track log file which is all the scorer published, but this is the likely reason for the the strange time error.

The French took up the protest because correcting the finish order would most probably take enough points away from Attila to put Mario 3rd (in the official results one second between Attila into goal second and Alex into goal 3rd on the last day is worth eight points, and Attila took the bronze officially by just 5 points).

Also it seems that on earlier tasks there had been a manual correction of finish order (unlike on this last day).  There are also some problems with earlier 6030 firmware that is known to lose four seconds compared to the latest, but larger errors like Christian's on the last day were not encountered previously.

It seems that in the end CIVL officials refused to allow a manual correction of Christian's finish time for the last task (I'm not sure if previous smaller manual corrections actually occurred or not), even though many pilots agreed that the published result was wrong.  Mario was not impressed and refused to collect the 4th place FAI diploma and was not present at the prize giving.

I think the only way to regard it is as a strange non catastrophic GPS failure for Christian that worked out in Attila's favor.  In the end the final scores are altered by everyone else's score, even if that score is due to a dodgy GPS (or a good one is a dodgy carbon pod).

GPS's are so much better than anything we had to score with previously (pilots were getting away with half a kilometer on every turnpoint a few short years ago), but it is not yet 100% reliable and accurate.  In any case, take a look at your track logs and if there are regular dropouts send it back to the manufacturer.  The dropouts are easily recognised from vast altitude errors (sea level points).  Those dropouts might cost you your score, but may also affect someone else's significantly!

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