Health and mobility issues mean that I get my O-kicks sitting at a PC, printing your event maps and post-processing your results. The latter activity brings you the NI Series, the Club Colour Standards, Spring Cup and Autumn Trophy tables and the hCOW Colour and hCOW WEE scores and handicaps. From elsewhere you can get the BOF Rankings, the monthly WEE winners and, presumably on-the-way, the NI Urban League tables. All intended to help you compare yourself with others and yourself and so improve your O-skills. Well here comes another one!
The more senior (i.e. old!) members may remember, in the pre-internet days, that I distributed news, fixtures and results by newsletter. The colour classes were very under-populated in those days so I came up with the idea of having competition across the colours by using, not speed, but improvement i.e. a handicap system. The current hCOW system was invented to provide regularity testing i.e. how well you could maintain your handicap but I’ve come to realise that it could also be used to reward improvement in handicap. In fact it’s better than the original handicapping system in that it takes terrain differences into account (I’ll leave it to the statistician nerds amongst you to decide how well it does that).
So for the remaining colour events in this year’s calendar there’s a new table – the Regatta table – with points based on your performance against handicap; the better your improvement the better will be your score. Even if you don’t return a result at an event (organiser, dns or dnf) you’ll be given points equal to 1 more than the last finisher so everyone with a handicap will have a Regatta score. With 6 events in the programme it will be 4 to count.