Dealing with a protest

Protests are made public once they have been decided so there is no breaking of confidence here.

One team has protested to the Jury; it's the last action of the Jury before declaring the results as official. It concerns the positioning of a GPS point in the scoring system.

Competitors were told to fly to a place on the official map - in this case it is a road junction. Before the start of the task, someone in the organising team must have visited the road junction and taken a GPS fix - they can't use a mapping programme and especially not Google Earth or Google Maps which may not correspond with the official map at all. Competitors see the road junction, they fly over it and the scorer makes sure that the road junction is accurately logged by GPS.

In this case the competitor was scored as missing the road junction. He wasn't happy so he drove to the junction and took his own GPS fix. It was about 20m different from the official one. Mind you, those 20m were vital; using his fix he scored more points.

The rules state that the scorer has a small margin of error and the scorer's fix was within that margin - if, of course, the scorer made an error at all. Maybe the competitor did!

Anyway, the jury have to look at the facts, talk to everyone involved, read the rules and then decide, according to everything they have considered, what to do.

In this case, the scorer's fix was acceptable and the competitor lost the protest. He still wins gold in his class...