Administration: Rules

[Hans Koraeus]

Current World Ranking rules and specifications are listed in the rules section at http://www.slalomranking.com.

This topic is aimed for any discussion and comments on current rules or suggestions for new ideas.

[Hans Koraeus]

Now and then I will publish some of the questions I have got personally that I think could be interesting for everybody to read.

Does bank slalom count in the ranking?
2012- Yes. Now bank slalom counts as a standard slalom discipline.
-2011 No. Only the the standard disciplines (Super Tight, Tight, Slalom, Giant and Super Giant).

Why does Slalom Cross count in the ranking then? I don't think it should.
Odd disciplines does not count into the ranking unless they correspond to any of the standard disciplines. For Slalom Cross this is no problem. The qualification could be considered a Giant slalom or Super G.

How do I know the difference between a Giant Slalom and a Super G? And between any of the other disciplines for that matter?
That is a very good question. There are no international rules specifying this in detail. The ISSA rules have a good specification of cone distances for the ISSA disciplines.
- Straight paralell slalom: 1.7 m
- Special slalom: 1.6-4 m (Average 2-2.5 m)
- Giant slalom: 2-10 m (Average 3-5 m)

There has been a try on this site (here) to try and make a more complete specification that covers all the standard disciplines now used in the World Ranking. See discipline table in meters or feet.

For the moment organizers use their common sence. For the overall ranking it actually doesn't matter since they are all included. It gets important though if you later want to do rankings based on the disciplines.

[Hans Koraeus]

This is how the junior class looks like on four of the bigger European competitions in 2004...

- Paris: will not have a junior class. Juniors will race in Am class.
- Grüningen: -16.
- Antibes: Born 86 or later (-18?)
- Köln: -15

It's a mess! Wouldn't it be good to try and agree on something. I think it should be the same everywhere and not dependent on what people show up to race. If there are not enough skaters to run a group then move them all up a step.

For example: If there is only one -11 skater he will move to the -14 group. If there are only two -14 skaters they will move up to the -17 group. I there are only three -17 skaters they will be moved up to the Am/Open class.

Here are the World ranking discipline classes.

Age Class
45- Legends Men/Women
Open Pro Men/Women
Open Am/Open Men/Women
-17 Junior boys/girls
-14 Boys/girls
-11 Kids

A junior may enter the Am group. A Female may enter Male groups.


You could also imagine that the top juniors are automatically invited to the Am class. One could also imagine the same thing for the top amateurs to be invited to the Pro class. This should in these cases of course only be a proposed option for them and in no way be forced upon them.

[Hans Koraeus]

Trying new Time advance rule

The whole idea with the current World Ranking status/point system is that racers will know the status of the competitions before they plan their travel. We can’t expect that all racers can enter all competitions during the season so it’s important to be able to plan in advance. The higher the status the more important it is for racers to know in advance. Since no such limits have been used before they are not very hard. Here are the minimum limits on how much in advance a competition with a certain status should be set and decided.

Major: 4 months
Main : 3 months
Prime: 2 months
Basic: 1 month
Plain: (no time advance needed)

[Jadranko Radovanovic]

Hi Corky,

I think the title on slalomranking.com

"World Ranking, Men Pro 2004" is false. If you write World Ranking, Men Pro 2004
that means Ranking of 2004 season. Not the ranking of the 3 best seasons results.

If it's the Men Pro 2004 Ranking, than Maurus Strobel must be on the top.
I heard this from my friends who are visiting this site !! They aren't involved in slalom and they understand that Mollica was on the Top in 2004.

I don't know why there are rankings about 3 years. Is there a reason why ??


Jadranko

[Hans Koraeus]

Jadranko,

Yes you are right. This title is wrong and can be misleading. We have been wanting to change this since a while back. The ranking on the first home page should be changed. It should say only...

World Ranking, Men Pro 3 best seasons

...and it should contain the top 20 racers. Also those who was top 20 in the last season should get listed. Arrows should show if you are going up or falling down the ranking.

Have a look again at http://www.slalomranking.com in the news about 2004 rankings. There you can see the listings somewhat how I would like them to show on the homepage.

The buttons in the ranking section should also have be changed to conform better looking something like this...

World Rankings
Men, Pro (3 best seasons)
Men, Am (1 season)
Women (3 best seasons)
Junior boys (1 season)
Junior girls (1 season)

All rankings
Season ranking, Men
Season ranking, Women
4-year ranking, Men
4-year ranking, Women

Other
Events
Racers


The reason this was done was that it was too complicated having all these rankings (28!) and too many who could say that they had the World Ranking title. That is why I filtered out 5 as World Rankings and the rest are other interesting rankings.

Actually from the start I wanted it to be a long time goal to be a World Rank champion. Nothing that you can achieve in one year. But I understood that the 1-year ranking results also are very interesting. Then I realized that multiple year rankings for Am and juniors was not fair since top racers don't stay long in these classes.

I like the idea of the serious rankings (Men, Pro and Women) should be a more long-term goal. Most other world rankings I assume takes into account more than 1 season. Remember that even though it is called 4-year ranking only the 3 best seasons count. And the third best only counts 50%.

Best year
2:nd best
3:rd best (50%)
4:th best (0%)

So to be in top of the world ranking you would (most likley) need 3 competition seasons during the last 4 years. I don't think that is wrong for the most serious ranking classes (Pro Men and Women). The idea IS that it should be hard.

It is true that before you have your 3 season results you can have a very good 1-year ranking result and that would not fully be reflected in the World Ranking. But that is only during the start-up period of your first 3 seasons. After that you can turn it the other way around. If you are in the top you can have a very bad season or even jump over a season for any reason (work, injury, having a baby, studies, ...) and it doesn't mean you will fall to the very bottom of the World Ranking. It may not even affect you at all. So in a sense it is hard in the beginning (until you got 3 season results) but once this is done you are up and going and will have a more stable ranking. I think 1-year rankings are too nervous in this sense. You expect a World Ranking to have some sort of stability. Nobody should be able to come in with one year of competition racing and be king of the World Ranking. It will take more than that. A real long-term committment for the sport and the slalom racing scene. Those are the ones in my view worthy of the two most prestigeous World Ranking titles, the "Men, Pro" and "Women" classes.

We are now in a unique and hard period because everybody is in this start-up period. Once the start-up period is over for the majority of racers after the season of 2005 then that is when I see the true start of the World Ranking.

But I agree that the season rankings for "Pro, Men" and "Women" are also of great interest. One could imagine hearing on a competition "Here is Maurus Strobel from Switzerland. Number 1 last season" as well as "Here is Maurus Strobel. Number 2 on the World Ranking". Whatever sounds best for each racer.

[Hans Koraeus]

2005 will be the first year that the World Ranking will be running during the season. There is nothing better than the trial and error way of doing things. I quickly noticed that if calculating the rankings the current way the first half season could get very skewed for people attending many competitions early on in the season. The ranking count the 8/6 best discipline results per year for a person. But when calculating only the 3 first months this way it is not a very good idea.

So I have now implemented a new rule on how to calculate rankings during the season. During different periods during the year the number of best discipline results counted are different. In the beginning it is lower and then increases until the end of the year when the full 8/6 best results count.

I have also decided to have fixed dates during the year when rankings are calculated. This will be done at the end of each month. There are three exceptions: January, February and November. These months have very few events for the moment. This gives us the following rank calendar below.

<center></center>

In the calendar you can see the official dates for all the World Ranking calculations during the season. You can also see how many of the best discipline results that are counted into the rankings. The total number of disciplines per year are divided into sections.
For example:
- In the World Ranking, March 31, only the 2 best discipline results will count in the rankings calculated.
- In the World Ranking, April 30, the 3 best results will count in the pro rankings and the 2 best discipline results in the other rankings.


Virtual year point

During the season a virtual year point will be calculated for all persons in a rank class. For each person who entered the rank class the previous year and each person entering the rank class the current year of course. This is done to be able to better follow the movement of racers during the season. It's always fun to be able to see who is going up and who is falling in the rankings continuesly and not having to wait until the end of the year.

For more info on this have a look at www.slalomranking.com at "rules/calculations/Season rank calculations".

[Wesley Tucker]

(Duplicated post)

OK.

Three things. I'm assuming this was Corky's decision but it may also have had some input from others. I don't know. But in the USA, the dividing line is the Mississippi River. That means Texas and St. Louis are in the Region West Atlantic: USA West. So they have to compete with the Western states for whatever race categories are available.

Secondly, Canada has their own region, so any racing up there has no impact on the available race categories for those of us in the Region West Atlantic: USA East.

Finally, Corky likes to emphasize this is OUR ranking system and we need to make our input known as to what we want. I would make the following suggestion:

Region West Atlantic: USA East
Region West Atlantic: USA West
Region West Atlantic: USA MIDWEST

This new Midwest region would include Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisianna, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Winsconsin. This new region (which has a population of around 103,000,000 people) would then have access to Major, Main, Prime and Basic racing.

[Wesley Tucker]

(Duplicated Post)

OK,

I'm not one to point a finger and say, "somebody needs to do something!" without providing some support to make it work. So I crunched a couple of number, played with photoshop and came up with this to support my assertiont the USA needs three regions. Here's the breakdown of the population of the proposed three regions:



And after the realignment, the USA would look like this:



This accomplished two things:

1. Allows more designated races for the largest group of racers on Earth

2. Allows racers to travel less to get to Major, Main and Prime events

It's very simple and very logical. Or does someone think we American racers should travel 1000s of miles in order to get some prime points? That's the only reason I can see against making this change.

[Hans Koraeus]

I wrote something about it here...

USA regions text

[Hans Koraeus]

I will soon post a proposal for how to handle canceled events.

[Hans Koraeus]

I get some questions now and then from event organizers concerning the World Rankings. There are two specific topics made concerning events in the rules section at slalomranking.com. A good first step and help for slalom organizers interested in the World Rankings.

I.e. here

[Hans Koraeus]

What is the balance in our slalom world? For me there are some variables to consider, the skill in a region, travel distance, amount of travel, reasonable budget for a racer to put down on travel, reasonable attendance on competitions, planning, spreading the sport.

The World Ranking system is trying to deal with all of this knowing that these things can never be measured perfectly and by that knowing that there are no perfect rankings. Not in any sport. But we have to oversee that and just try to play by some sort of rules and when the results does not balance in the eyes of racers or those interested in the international slalom scene then you change the rules to handle the new situation. The World Ranking Rules are not written in stone. They will change. But are the World Rankings so wrong? Are they so skewed? Are any racers from a specific region obviously favoured or disfavoured?

The WR system makes the racers compete (of course) but it also makes the organizers compete. Some might not like that. And it also wants to give other organizers a chance now and then to attract the better skaters even if they are in regions with a less developed slalom scene.

The WR system also wants to encourage people to travel. And this also for those from places with a more intense slalom scene. Some in hot slalom regions for example might not like that because the balance is working a little bit against them having a large slalom scene. But the idea is to help those regions with a less of a slalom scene also. It’s hard enough for them as it is. If they on top of it all would be the ones we expect to do all the travelling too it is not really helping them on their home ground. And this is a fact even in the current system but at least it tries to balance it in the right direction. They normally have fewer competitions, fewer high statuses to use but maybe the field is a little bit lighter. For me it’s some kind of a balance. And the idea is if the field is lighter it may attract some racers that suddenly think it’s worth the trip. Then they may do themselves a favour, they help the region, and they help spreading slalom outside their own region and by that helps the whole international slalom scene. That’s not to forget in all of this.

For the regions with a lot of high skill slalomers around. They can organize a lot of competitions and they don’t have to travel far and they will easily get many skilled racers and get a lot of high status competitions with very little time and money effort for the local riders. There is not much money in our sport and we who compete do have a limited budget. We don’t have the luxury to travel to more than 5-6 competitions per season. And if you already did that I would say it’s extremely good. The average travels for racers I don’t know. Maybe one could find out by saying a travel is when it takes you more than x hours getting there or by having a distance of x kilometres. Price could be a parameter in this as well. We can never take away the fact that some always have advantages over others that have nothing to do with slalom skills. But we can try to balance it up a little.

But remember the World Ranking is not all. There are many other reasons to go to competitions. Maybe a World Cup, American Cup, European Cup. It could be for the plain and simple reason of fun racing and meeting slalom friends. A nice competition site and you name it. These cups could have other rules of how to deal with things. Actually I think it could be a good idea that they are different, to again come back to the magic word, balance things up.

The text above is from a year ago. Just to get some general background.

Sure it is possible to add more statuses to the different regions in the World Ranking. As long as the system keeps its idea of some sort of a world balance. So if we increase statuses then that will force us to also increase the number of minimum events demanded of racers. So it will then be somewhat closer to some high WR statuses for us but we will instead be forced to travel to more competitions. In the long run with a growing world slalom scene this is logical. Are we all ready for it?

Now a pro skater must at least enter 4 high status events during the year (and enter at least 2 disciplines per event). Are we ready to demand 5 events per year? Will a fair world balance gain on this?

I have said this many times before. And each time I think about these changes I feel that sometimes that we are trying to solve regional problems with the world ranking system. Regional problems should be solved with regional series (American Cup, European Cup, aso). Only World balance problems should be solved with the World Ranking system. Do we have a world balance problem? If so let's try to fix it. If not...