Adventure Racing World Championship 2016
Referee Referee!
Rob Howard / 09.11.2016
A new innovation for this year’s AR World Championship is to have Race Referees.
It might not be obvious what exactly they are going to adjudicate on, after all adventure racing is quite unlike most other sports. There is no ‘did the ball cross the line’ or ‘was it a foul’, but adventure racing does have l complex rules, and they often need to be applied in unpredictable and unexpected situations.
Sometimes circumstances (weather or logistics) force changes to be made during races and these can impact on teams in different ways, meaning timing adjustments have to be made – and these are open to debate. So too are penalties applied to teams for infringements. As a result there are often protests from teams who disagree with a Race Directors decision ... which is where the referees come in. In many ways AR needs referees more than any other sport.
For this championship race there are two referees, Mark Harris of REV3 Adventure, the Race Director of Cowboy Tough, which will host next year’s ARWC, and Arthur Raichmann of Estonia, a racer, who attended last year’s World Championships in Brazil as a reporter, and who also has experience of an AR refereeing role in the Estonian national race series.
Both were on hand today during registration to talk to teams about the rules for the race ahead, making sure they were correctly interpreted and understood by teams speaking many different languages.
When I spoke to Raichmann he stressed this was an important part of the job.
“I think we should inform and advise in the first place, rather than penalise. For example if a team is not supposed to cross a road, we could be there to make sure they don’t, not hide in the bushes to see if they do and get a penalty.”
He added, “If nobody notices or mentions me then it is best, but from my experience as a referee in Estonia the decisions we may have to make are never black and white. There can often be no right answer and someone will always be unhappy with the outcome.”
Everyone wants the fairest race and result possible and their role is to help achieve this, and during the race they will observing around the course, watching out for potential problems.
Let’s hope both Arthur and Mark can remain in the background, unnoticed, and any decisions they make will not impact the front few teams in the race.
You can read the standard AR World Series rules at http://www.xpd.com.au/rules.htm
[Rob Howard is Editor in Chief of www.SleepMonsters.com – the destination website for adventure racing and endurance sports.]
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