FuzzyL

Looks surprisingly normal. And I would immediately try that.

AAARRR!

Runout was just a little to the left of where he ended up.

@Lookinforit: If a 100 points scale is used, with two decimals, no less, for a mostly subjective score, that typically first has to be discussed among the judges for several minutes, I think that should tell everybody all they need to know about judging at Rampage.

At this point they should just not give scores anymore. The article claims every judged competition had this kind of controversy at some point. I beg to differ. Yes, there is always some controversy, but almost nowhere to even remotely the same extent. The reason is, that most disciplines, like the ice skating mentioned, have long established judging criteria, while for Rampage there are basically none, and pretty much all other disciplines have independent judging, which is also not present at Rampage. And most other disciplines use a points scale for judging, which Rampage only pretends to do. Actually, there would be an easy way to get rid of the judging at Rampage once and for all: Let each judge come up with their individual score, without allowing them to interact. The result would be so incredibly ridiculous, that judging at Rampage would never recover.

@sledMXer: It’s a trade-off, with the nobs digging deeper you gain grip but lose rolling speed. That’s why teams try to cut to what they consider to be the perfect compromise for the conditions at hand. Still, seems very esoteric to me…

@rrolly: You mean like the Norco team is wearing?

@VorsprungSuspension: „in addition to” would mean having a larger number of riders in finals. That is where your basic assumption is wrong, qualifying formats were not introduced in sports to keep uncompetitive participants out of finals, but to reduce a field of competitive participants on account of only a limited number of spots in finals being available due to space or time constraints. Specifically for downhill, we have seen quite a lot of races, where track conditions changed significantly between first rider and last. Even for that reason alone, I think it makes a lot of sense to have only a limited number of spots in finals. And if we agree on that, there has to be a limit, and if you think some riders should be protected, because right now it is too much about luck, then you would also have to point out, which riders those were, that were just lucky, and should not have been in finals yesterday. Talking about the world champ not being fast enough to make it to finals, as you said: Well, what I saw was the world champ crashing several times, and to be honest, I’ve not read much about it yet, but it looked to me like he wasn’t up to speed anymore after that heavy hit in practice. Should he have been in finals despite crashing when it mattered? What if he crashes in his finals run, do we say, oh he is world champ, that was just bad luck, everybody wants to see his time, let’s just get him back up the mountain again? Don’t get me wrong, I’m gutted for Jackson at his home race, I had him on my fantasy team and was rooting for him. But he had his fair chance to qualify, and none of the riders who were in finals deserved it any less.

@VorsprungSuspension: So you say we should have someone in finals based on something they did in the past, on different tracks, in different conditions and not have someone in finals who is faster than them in the here and now?

Yeah, this round fantasy picks were just too easy, this track, and then the knowledge that there might be challenging conditions, I picked Jackson on home soil and Marine, who ist great on slippery tracks, to be on the safe side. Almost as heartbroken for Marine as for Jackson, in timed training in the mud she was still fastest by a mile…