Athletes, IFC, and team leaders meet on future of freestyle rules by Will Richardson | Jan 21, 2005 | Whitewater | 0 comments January 21, 2005 At the City Council building in downtown Penrith, in a board room, an unlikely group of people filled the room. Dressed like your typical kayakers, bear foot, sandals, t-shirts, and shades, the room filled quickly, with athletes and representatives from the corners of the earth. The subject of conversation was to be the rules that freestyle will use in competition. Muppett from England worked out a system over the past year, while, Fred from the French Federation had a full power-point presentation. North America represented by Kristine declined presenting our system that we used in 2004 competition because it was almost identical to the French system, and the last thing we wanted to do is to confuse the issue and split the crowd. The beautiful thing about the meeting was the incredible consistency in the desires and goals for the scoring system to be chosen or created. It was simply to encourage the best and most variety of moves in a rides, eliminating repetition and the ability to win with easier moves repeated. There were plenty of discussions that appeared to be arguments on different points such as a style score, or a completion bonus, or a vertical bonus, etc., etc. but in the end it was an issue of trying to imagine the system in action and lots of uncertainly due to lack of experience with them that raised questions. However, the committee, the athletes and the team leaders are all quite unanimous in their position to replace the existing system with a system like the one used in North America and France, and proposed by the UK. The other main factor in determining a system was to assure that it is easy to implement, easy to score, and easy to understand. The beautiful thing about the variety only systems: You don’t need a calculator or computer- simple addition of move scores and bonuses for Huge or Big, or Completion and you have a final score. In the ideal situation when you use an odd number of judges you can drop the high and low judges leaving a single middle score, which prevents the need for compiling multiple scores and also eliminates potential bias scores that would either jack up or bring down an athletes final score. This is very cool. A spectator can watch and see what moves an athlete does and determine who is winning, much easier to understand. All that is remaining for the IFC to do is to complete a scoring system in writing, either adopting the US/Canada, French or UK system and make any adjustments that are requested, or use the spirit of them to write a new set of rules that starts from scratch. Any way you cut it, freestyle is moving forward once again! 🙂 EJ Board Room Czech Team Rep Getting thinks started Natailie Calder, Mike Birbeck, and Lawrence Simpson Peter Flowers and Mike Birbeck Submit a Comment Cancel replyYour email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Email * Website Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ