The Veteran Fours Head 2016 took place on Sunday 13 November, starting in the morning at 10:32 and running on the flood tide, with a course from Barn Elms to Chiswick Staithe.
It was an eventful race from a timing perspective, with some new and unforeseen problems. We had real time results, as normal for the last few years, but for the first time we had a long delay before getting out the results. What happened?
We had an excellent timing team this year, with Kings College London (KCL) Boat Club playing a big part. We had real time results flowing in nicely, and being published straight onto the website using SkyDrive. After the race the Start and Finish timing devices came back and we started to go through them, as normal, to update the missing crew identifications. This is where we can't make out the crew number by eye, so we put in a dummy number in real time and correct it later. It's quite normal to have crews like this. We make a note of the blades and fill in the number afterwards. But it quickly became clear that some of the identifications at the Start could not be right.
I forget the exact order of event, but we had a very polite enquiry asking if we were sure about one time; and we went through the crews and found some that could not be right. So we pulled the published provisional times off the web, put up a note to say that we had good times but needed to check the crews, and started work.
The basic problem was that we knew that some crews had been mis-identified, but we did not have an authoritative source of the correct crews. I should explain how this works. There is always a risk that the timers will get something wrong. They have to work quickly to keep up with the crews, and it is easy to make a mistake, or simply not have time to get the correct data. It is not too bad at the Start, but much harder at the Finish. We cover this by having: an independent sequence with just the crew numbers and no attempt to match them to time; and a video. Like most races we don't have an abundance of volunteers, and we have to choose what roles are most important. We normally have a video at the Finish, but not at the Start.
This year it went badly wrong. We (especially I) did not foresee that, running on the flood tide in the morning, the Sun would be low and in the eyes of the timers at the Start. The low Sun and the reflection on the water made our new yellow numbers unreadable. The timing team literally could not see the number. Looking at the data after the race, I can see that they made a fantastic and largely successful effort to get the crew identities, by recognising them and looking up the number.
This is where our problems compounded. Because the numbers could not be read, the sequencers conferred to agree who the crew was. This meant that we had only one sequence, and not several to compare. And we did not have a video because it was at the Finish.
The good news, before you leap to a conclusion, is that the times were good. Times and crew numbers are two different data streams. In our system we use a separate button presser, who is not distracted by trying to identify a crew. We did the usual thing of comparing the Timy times with the stopwatch to see if there were any big discrepancies, and there were not. This may be a little hard to understand if you are a competitor. You imagine that if a time is "wrong" then the timing team must just guess at what is right, but that's not the case. The time is exactly right: it is just matched to the wrong crew. By elimination you can eventually get to the right crew, giving the right result.
We had about three or four places in the results where the identified order at the Start was clearly wrong. We were helped by some very constructive and supportive information from crews. We pieced together information from different sources about who was behind and who was ahead; who overtook and was overtaken.
We managed to piece it together, and I am confident of the result. We ended with, in one case, a three way tie between three crews that we had trouble identifying. They may have thought this was a bit of a coincidence, but it was in fact one of the most validated results of the race. They had a thrilling race, and their results were corroborated by: the coxes view of who was ahead and behind at the Start; intermediate places at Chiswick; BigBlade photos at three places; and an observer on Barnes Bridge.
It was an unforeseen problem, and it ended our run of several years of good quick results. It reinforces the view that you absolutely must have an independent backup of some kind, and you must test it as if you had to rely on it alone.
What will we do to stop this happening again? Number one is that you can't use yellow numbers with a low Sun behind. Number two is to use photographs at Start and Finish as the independent sequence. But where to find the volunteers is another question.