Discussion: World rankings

The implementation of the new system doesn't seem to have occurred as intended - in essence, instead of using the scores from the old system to seed the new one, they've started from scratch as of July 2012. The effect of this is that for "normal" WREs, the number of points available is critically dependent on how many people in your race's field have run a WOC or World Cup in the last 18 months; if the answer is few or none, the winning score will be the minimum (800) or close to it. (This effect will eventually wash out of the system, but it could take years to do so if nothing is changed).

I'm putting a proposal to IOF to correct this. In the meantime, points under the new system should be treated as unstable.

Which is a real shame, cos now we actually need those WRE points to have a fair start time at WOC...

I would hope that a fix can be implemented before WOC (though no promises).

Larry, when there was talk about 10 years ago of using WR for WOC qualification i suggested the following...

for world ranking events (in particular middle and sprint distances) we should have a qualification race, and only 10 people go through to the final. for me (well, 2004 Shep) that was going to achieve 2 things: give me more experience running qualification races with real pressure to race well and qualify (say 2 heats top 5 go through?); and to have only the "top" 10 runners affecting the WR score calculations. I did once write a script to go through the years results and recalculate the AUS ranking scores with only the top 10 runners counting and the scores were, in general, higher. And often significantly so. The only example i have handy is VIC long champs 2009 where i scored 1082 (using the raw algorithm without the dodgy fudge factor which is used to get them to align with the WR scores), if only the top 10 runners are included the score goes up to 1206 (although note that while the scores for the top places went up, the scores for the slowest of the top 10 actually went down).

in terms of NOL scores, i suggested the B final results be essentially appended to the A final results to calculate NOL points (ie if you win the B final you're placed 11th in the NOL race). so qualify or not - you're still in with a chance of scoring both NOL and WR points - remembering that there are plenty of WREs around where the number of runners is so big that they do have A and B "finals" (start spots aren't always allocated with a qualification race, they're sometimes done on ranking).

if WR points are important to us for WOC maybe we should be seriously thinking about something like that to get Simon and Larry some more points.