Adding another judge - 2C.1.X Technical Judge
This discussion has an associated proposal. View Proposal Details here.Comments about this discussion:
Started
For the technical disciplines under 2B.8 no judges are currently named in the rulebook. I think it would be much more logical if also for these disciplines judges and their responsibilities would be listed in chapter 2C.
Proposal for the new rule:
2C.1.6 Technical Judge
1. The Technical Judge supervises the adherence to the corresponding competition rules in the Technical disciplines.
2. The Technical Judge shall score and record all attempts of the athletes in the Technical disciplines. There shall be at least two Technical Judges for each Technical Competition.
Comment
This is probably a good idea. It should include wording to state why, and in which situations a Technical Judge is required, followed by the specific duties those experts should be doing. For example, the Technical Judge is not necessarily the person doing scoring and recording, which may not require specialized knowledge of an event. They probably need to concentrate on the details, making sure competitors are adhering to the details of the rules, such as completely crossing the finish line, maintaining constant forward motion, etc.
The description should also specify when these positions must be filled, such as national and international competitions only, or when they are otherwise recommended.
Comment
I think basically in all technical disciplines there are rules whose adherence must be observed and for this the Technical Judges are needed. I think it is very difficult to state exactly which tasks the Technical Judges have, because each Technical Discipline has very different rules whose adherence must be observed. So I tried to cover all three aspects "Why, When and What" in sentence 1. Will this be clearer if we add to the first sentence as follows:
1. The Technical Judge supervises the adherence to the corresponding competition rules in the Technical disciplines according to 2B.8 and the corresponding subchapters.
I am also open to other suggestions, however, I personally cannot think of a simple wording to summarize the numerous different tasks resulting from the subchapters of 2B.8 in a meaningful way here.
Regarding the comment that the Technical Judges are not necessarily the ones doing the scoring and recording: In my opinion, these persons should also be considered Technical Judges in any case, because scoring and recording are crucial processes for the entire competition. If mistakes are made here, they may be very difficult or impossible to correct, so the task is very important and involves a lot of responsibility, so that in the end reliable results are obtained.
I think your last comment also refers to the sentence: "There shall be at least two Technical Judges for each Technical Competition", right? We can add here that this is mandatory for national and international events.
What do the others think about that?
Comment
I agree that scoring and recording is very important, but I don't consider it a technical role. Rather is it administrative. In my view, a Technical Judge considers adherance to the rules from a "technical" standpoint. The recording can be done by the same person, or by an administrative official.
Is the requirement to have at least two Technical Judges (be it in some or all technical disciplines) based on the current Rulebook? If so, which section?
Comment
Okay, I think I understand why you think that "Technical Judge" is not an appropriate term - from my point of view, the "technical" does not refer to the fact that someone judges the adherence to the rules from a "technical" point of view (then you could also call the lane judge and the finish line judge Technical Judges), but only that it is a judge who is used to judge a technical discipline directly at the competition site (and I can't deny that I got the idea from athletics, where the definition is exactly the same).
I think this point of view also simplifies the situation a little bit, because there is no difference if a judge is there for example at coasting to judge if the rules are followed from a technical point of view or for measuring and recording the distance. There has to be someone there for both, which I would simply call Technical Judge.
I believe the current rulebook does not mandate a specific number of judges in any technical discipline. However, I think for all official competitions the four eyes principle definitely makes sense. In track races, for example, there is always a starter, timekeeper, lane judge/finish line judge, so there are always at least three judges watching an attempt.
Comment
I have no problem defining Technical Judges as you to in your proposed text, if this is "borrowed" from athletics as you say.
So yeah, I agree to the proposed text.
Comment
In athletics the naming of the judges is the same, they are just called judges, but the structure of the rules distinguishes between judges for Track Events and Field Events. Since the Field Events are called Technical Disciplines in the IUF Rulebook, I would call the judges there Technical Judges. However, if that doesn't seem logical, I am open to other ideas.
Comment
Maybe they can just be called "Judges" in both Track Racing and Technical Disciplines (and in all the other disciplines like Road, Muni, Jumps, ...)?
Alternatively we could use "Track Racing Judges" and "Technical Discipline Judges". Then it is clear that "Technical" does not refer to the rechnicality of their role but to the type of event they're judging.
Comment
Actually, I like the idea that judges who have certain tasks, such as the finish line judge or the lane judge also have their own names and a corresponding subchapter in the rulebook. Calling them all just "Judges" leads in my opinion to the problem that from the rules it is no longer quite clear which judge actually has which task.
What about using the term "Technical Disciplin Judge" for just the Judge I proposed here insted of "Technical Judge" and let all the other judges as they are? So we keep the structure proposed in poroposal 1 and only adjust the name for the new judge.
Comment
OK I think I misunderstood the issue. I now see that the Technical (Discipline) Judge role is not further divided into subroles (specific judges), whereas in Track Racing there are subroles like Finish Line Judge etc.
I agree to the name Technical Discipline Judge.
Comment
I think we have found a suitable name. I have added to the originally proposed rule, as suggested by John, the information for which competitions at least two judges are required and for which recommended. Are there any further comments on the proposal?
Proposal for the new rule:
2C.1.6 Technical Disciplin Judge
1. The Technical Disciplin Judge supervises the adherence to the corresponding competition rules in the Technical Disciplines according to 2B.8 and the corresponding subchapters.
2. The Technical Disciplin Judge shall score and record all attempts of the athletes in the Technical Disciplines. There shall be at least two Technical Disciplin Judges for each Technical Discipline at Unicon and other national and international competitions, and it is strongly recommended that this is also applied to all other competitions.
Comment
What I just noticed: Is the sentence "There shall be at least two Technical Discipline Judges for each Technical Discipline [...]" in relation to the "Technical Discipline" precise enough? There are indeed events where several competitions are held in parallel in one discipline, of course the rule actually refers to each competition and not the discipline as such. Maybe it would be more reasonable to write the following: "There shall be at least two Technical Discipline Judges for each competition of a Technical Discipline [...]".
I think regarding the distinction of event, discipline, competition etc. the rulebook is currently not very consistent - maybe we should look in general that we define the individual things more clearly and use the appropriate terms in the appropriate places.
Comment
I mostly agree to the proposal. The only thing is: I am not sure if we should require at least two judges for national events, as these can struggle to get enough volunteers. But I'd say that for IUF World Records to be set/broken, at least two knowledgeable Technical Discipline Judges must judge the rider's achievement.
Small typo: the word Discipline has an e at the end.
I agree to your edit "for each competition of..."
Regarding your last point, this has come up before (some years ago) but has not been concluded. I support looking into this.
Comment
I am also fine with two judges only being recommended for national events but not being mandatory. In Germany, we would probably require two judges for all official events anyway - but that would just be following the recommendation, which would not be a problem.
Comment
I have second thoughts about "at least two Technical Discipline Judges for each competition of a Technical Discipline"
I think the intention of this phrase is the four-eyes principle, right? Now, sometimes a competition can have two or even more parallel venues, e.g. two Slow Balance lanes (of equal width), to speed up the progress of the competition.
How about "at least two Technical Discipline Judges for each attempt with a Technical Discipline"?
Secondly, the (English) word Discipline still needs an e at the end. The first three occurrences in the proposal are spelled as Disciplin.
Comment
Yes, that was exactly the intention of the sentence and the reason why we changed from the original proposal "There shall be at least two Technical Judges for each Technical Competition." to the proposal "There shall be at least two Technical Discipline Judges for each competition of a Technical Discipline [...]". But I can see that competition may still be ambiguous and your proposal here is more clear, so probably we should go with you suggestion.
The spelling mistakes should be corrected now.
Comment
The review time of the proposal is over and since there were no further comments or suggestions for improvement, I assume that all committee members agree with the proposal.
I will now open the voting and hope that all voting members of the committee will also participate in the voting.