Wednesday, June 15, 2005

White Caps and DQ's

Tridaddy reads my posts some days and was quick to point out that our lake waves while larger than we've swam in weren't exactly gale size- and all of you ocean swimmers can stop laughing at my wave angst. I think tri training is challenging enough without exaggeration-so there's a lesson when writing for general public consumption-honesty. Not MSM honesty, but I can sleep at night honesty.

So that's clear.

I also wanted to make it very clear that the Jessi pose was 100% Trimama 2 idea- thanks for the inspiration Nancy!

Integrity counts. So here is my question. There was a race here on Sun and one of my teamates smoked the entire field, including pro men in the swim course. This was a USATF certified course with all the implication for points and nationals. Another teamate who swam the race suggested that a buoy was probably missed as it would be highly unusual for a master's woman to place that high in the swim. Missed buoy-DQ. Simple. But who is responsible to clarify the mistake? The athelete? Of course. What happens when they don't? Who should correct the error? The course judge? The sponsors? The team captain? A fellow Athelete? Me?

What would you do?

4 comments:

:) said...

I hate stuff like this! I am so non-confrontational.

/sticking his head back into the sand/

Tracy said...

Ooo - that's a tough one. I would say that it depends on how well you know her, if you're friends, I think I'd say something, if you just know her, I'd say leave it to the captain, or whomever (the officials, whatever).

And I know how you feel about those waves, the lake can get nuts - Lake Michigan throws some 5-footers some days, and I'm REALLY hoping they don't appear any time soon. Nothing like the ocean, though, man, nothing is like the ocean.

Bolder said...

You're right of course TriMama. It really is the masters class swimmer's responsibility to step forward and say 'Hey, this is beyond my wildest PR, I must have missed a marker buoy. Please scratch my result.'

Unfortunately, there is cheating in sport. Think Nina Kraft. The ramifications of not coming forward can be enormous -- can you say 'shunned'.

My sage advice though comes from hundreds of thousands of miles logged in the air, not in the water. Everytime I get on to a plane I make a mental note that if things get turbulent, I will not be rushing the cabin to throw in an assist. That's part of the air fare. To pay the guys up-front to do their thing.

Same thing applies for a USAT certified course. Bet there were race marshalls on the water if the race had implications for points and nationals. Plus, there were probably guys on surfboards and dingys chasing swimmers just for safety's sake. Make the conscious decision entering the race to just let the marshalls do what they get paid to do, and leave all the tri fun to you!

Comm's said...

I kind of agree with everyone. If I did not see it I probably would not make a big deal about it unless it directly affected me. Then I would be checking all the other races I could find that this person did to see if there was a big difference in time, then make a case.

Really this athlete should step up. The person may not have intentionally done anything wrong in the race but probably checked their swim time and realized it was a huge difference off normal. Maybe they don't think its a big deal, why bother.

But the officials or safetys should have stepped up if they saw it.