We at last enjoyed a day of fairly good soaring weather, which produced the longest tasks, best speeds, and best rate of task completion yet seen at WGC2021.  It also yielded 1000-point scores for the winners in two of the 3 classes, with Standard class excepted only due to a low finish by the fastest pilot.

In 15-Meter class, Sean Murphy and Tim Taylor were both among the daily top ten, finishing well ahead of multi-time world champion Sebastian Kawa.  He’s the favorite at every contest he enters, and had been standing in first place here.  But he got slow at the end of the day and finished alarmingly low, leading to a most uncharacteristic 19th place finish.

Unfortunately among the non-finishers was Daniel Sazhin, who landed just outside the finish cylinder.  It has been common that late in the day the areas near our airport are among the first to weaken.  This has led to a large number of close-in outlandings (offering the small benefit of short retrieves).  And it has made low-finish penalties (1 point per meter below the minimum finish height) common.

Finishes occur when a glider enters a cylinder of 5 km radius centered on the airfield. At the start of our contest, the minimum height for a penalty-free finish was 750 m.  Assuming normal glider performance, this should put gliders over the runway at around 620 ft – comfortably enough for a landing pattern that merges safely with traffic.  In response to many low-finish penalties and the way they affect scores, the minimum height was lowered to 700 meters, which has gliders entering the pattern at 450 ft – not so comfortable. And this change certainly didn’t eliminate low finishes.  We’ve seen more than a few finishes low enough that pilots have to do straight-in landings with no pattern possible, and in some cases can’t reach the airfield at all (with few attractive landing options on the way).

WGC2021 includes a distinctly French gliding contest feature: bring your own towrope.  There are advantages to using a new rope for each tow: towplanes drop the previous one on short final, then land, taxi into position, and the next rope – with glider already attached – is connected with minimal delay.  This scheme is reasonably common, but the Gallic twist is to require teams to supply those ropes for their pilots. They are laid out in front of each glider on the runway grid, long before launch time.  This allows some scope for crews’ artistic expression: a 60-meter rope can be arranged in various creative patterns (e.g. the outline of a glider), or perhaps to spell out a suitable short message, in script.

There are certainly some disadvantages, including the giant pile of discarded ropes that must be untangled and organized by crews at the end of the day, and that overseas teams must transport bulky ropes as airline baggage – or pay 50 euros (about 60% of the cost of a new one) as rental for the contest.  Ours were supplied by Sarah (with help from Tennessee volunteers Howard & Ann Bradley), and are the only ones made of shiny new yellow polypropylene; all the others are various dull and nondescript colors – which at least makes the retrieval job a bit easier for US crews.