Here's an issue for all the purists. Recently, for reasons I won't go into now, I was concerned with the aspect of racing known as COURSE LENGTH. It got me to thinking about what is the length of a slalom race course?
Well, the natural answer would be, "well, measure from the start line to the finish line, ya' dope!" Ah, but this is SLALOM. Is not the length of a race course the distance travelled THROUGH THE CONES? If you wanted to know the distance travelled by a racer on the hill, then you would have to know where the wheels went, not just where they started and ended, correct?
In another topic I mentioned to Gary Fluitt that neat little gadget that measures distances with the 12" diameter wheel. It will accurately measure a long distance down to an inch with little or no problem. If the need arose to require a known length for a race course, wouldn't you have to take such a device and measure through the cones, weaving left to right all the way down the hill? Let's face it, if a course has some serious wide offsets or even several medium hybrid offsets, it can add many feet to the overall length of the course.
Oh, why is this important? SImple: you need an accurate course measurement in order to determine an AVERAGE SPEED in KILOMETERS or MILES PER HOUR. If your course length is too short (start to finish only,) then your speed becomes confusingly SLOW. In other words, it takes you a long time to travel a short distance instead of a short time to travel a long distance.
Although top-end speed really doesn't factor into who wins, it certainly makes a good selling point. Advertising speeds "in excess of 25 mph!" looks a lot better than, "these guys make the course in under 18 seconds!" Kind of hard to put that in perspective.
