International 14 Worlds

So if only one discard, could it be seen that GBR1516 could have gone up the leader board if they had forced AUS631 bleow 28th ?

I have a feeling this one will run and run till we can get some first hand accounts......

There is an interesting story on this on The Daily Sail with long quotes from both Barker and Bell, the chairman of the jury. Since it is a subscription site, I suppose I had better not quote verbatim. 

Bell says Barker needed to push Irwin/Perry down to 26th to benefit and would have needed to slow them by 8 minutes to do so. Their tactics slowed them by 3 minutes and there was no chance they could have slowed them by 8. Therefore it was team racing.

Barker says they pushed Irwin/Perry to the left hand of the course, which along with most of the fleet they expected to be non-favoured. As it turned out, it was the way to go. If the shift had not favoured the left hand side, they say they might have got them to 26th and gained 2nd place in the series for themselves.

I think Barker makes a more plausible case that is was not team racing than the protest report gives them credit for. However if team racing tactics became common in fleet racing, it would ruin the sport. Therefore I think that given that GBR1516's tactics were, at best, open to question, the jury did the right thing.

Copy of my post on the other thread.  I think the Rule 2 bit is highly significant - more on the facts found when I reaccess them.

Is it? They are a protest committee, not a court of law. Protest decisions are made on the balance of probabilities all the time. "Reasonable doubt" is a defence in law but not in front of a protest committee. It is only a sailboat race albeit, in this case, quite an important one. 

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However Rule 2 binds the PC/IJ somewhat more than the normal standard of proof with the phrase "A boat may only be penalized under this rule if it is clearly established that these principles have been violated".  When I read the facts found I see some fairly hefty jumps of logic, which have been previously discussed.  They do not,to me, add up to "clearly established".

I would suggest that there was an imperative to give redress in the interests of a "fair" result.  As already commented PCs/IJs write facts found to support their conclusions.  To do so required a Rule 2 DNE. 

One can not know the reaction of Steve Morrison at this remove, but in all honesty the result is probably fair - from what I read it seems the Aussies would have closed the gap enough to win.  If Ian Barker and Co genuinely did not team race then they can feel extremely aggrieved at what is a signifcant slur.  If they did then fair enough - but my own feeling is that the IJ's facts found don't sufficiently support their conclusion in the context of standards of proof for Rule 2, and the other issues which go with that for the protestee.

Depends on what you mean by neutral. The IJ has made a controversial decision and Bell (chair) now has to stand by and justify that decision. Therefore the evidence he brings forward is the evidence that supports him. The protest document contains very little of what Barker said on the TheDailySail to justify himself. Maybe he didn't say those things during the protest - we don't know.

Thinking about this decision some more, what makes it really unusual as a protest case is that it is all about GBR1516's motivation rather than their behaviour. Normally a protest case is about....this was the geometry of the boats on the water (facts found) and here are the rules that apply. This case is about GBR1516's motivation. They could do exactly the same thing, and depending on why they did it, rule 2 was or was not broken. I don't think protest committees or IJs were really designed to make that kind of decision.

I think the balance of probabilities is that GBR1516 were team racing but I don't see the evidence as conclusive. Barker makes case that had the wind not shifted to favour the left, he may have been able to drive the AUS boat down to 28th. Can the IJ really be sure that he couldn't have. A very good point has been made on the other thread that the evidence standards for a rule 2 violation are higher than for other rules.  "A boat may only be penalized under this rule if it is clearly established (my italics) that these principles have been violated". 

So did the IJ clearly establish that if the wind had not shifted to favour the left, GBR1516 would still have had no chance to drive the AUS boat down to 28th. I'm not certain they did. The protest findings don't really address the question: they look at the finishing timings with the wind shift as it happened. Almost nobody expected the shift. The fleet went right and GBR1516 drove the AUS boat left precisely because it was expected not to be favoured.

The IJ had a very difficult case and I don't envy them. But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am they made the right decision. If the bigger picture, though, is the need to ensure that team tactics stay out of fleet racing, maybe they did the right thing. Tough for the two GBR boats though.