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Dragon Boat Canada


IDBF


Canoe Kayak Canada

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[Lethal Weapon]

And a few more....

CHUCK NORRIS!!!

[DuckMan]

Damnit Chuck Norris.. Your blocking my head.
Congrats on the Gold E&C, damn close race it was.

[DuckMan]

I only have one complaint for the weekend. The Damn repetetive music..  Same songs every 2 hours. all weekend long.?? cmon. get some more material in there.

[Zavion]

First off,  Great weekend!  Nanimo has always been a great festival.  Nice location,  great paddlers area and beer tent, everything ran smoothly with very few snags that I have heard about.  about the only thing I would want to suggest is getting different medals.  (Like the Alcan ones).  Or at least engrave the Division on the back of them so years form now you know what division it was! 

Great job everone!  A lot of teams have really improved a lot.  It Will be interesting to see what hapens in Victoria.

[chilipepper]

I have to agree that Nanaimo was excellent AGAIN this year.  Four years running it has been a big highlight in the season.  It doesn't have the same level of competition at the top tier as Alcan, or even Victoria, but that is more than offset by the great venue and the good spirit.  The Rec races are very competitive and fun to watch.  Lots of smiling people.  Bar none, it's the best beer garden going.  Any who is thinking about Nanaimo next year, just do it.  You won't regret it.  On a slightly different note, I stopped by the finish line tent and saw (it's true) video equipment!  If you aren't sure why this is significant, Nanaimo is run by GO, the same people that put on the Richmond festival.  There was some controversy last year at Richmond based on the lack of stop-capture equipment on the finish line.  It looks like that lack has been addressed.  In fact, while I was there a photo-finish race came in, and the officials put the image straight onto a laptop and made the right call.  It's great to see Dragonboat racing improving in all areas-racing, officiating, technology.  OK, I'll stop gushing now, but it was a great weekend. 

[rb]

One thing that would have made Nanaimo better is if the race organizers spent more effort on seeding teams.

Team Phoenix won Silver by 2 boat lengths, they should have been in a higher division.
Save On Foods Dragon Slayers won Gold by 2 boat lengths, they should have been in a higher division.
Blu by U should have been in a lower division.
Malaspina, Selkirk, and Bastion were well off the other Diamond teams. They should've been in a lower division.

That's just some examples of teams that didn't end up racing where they should.

At Alcan they spend a lot of effort seeding so that at the end the semi-finals and finals are close. Nanaimo now has 75 teams, that's plenty enough to have close races in every final. It's time for GO to put the effort in to making sure that similar teams end up against each other.

I was disappointed by that aspect of the races.

[chilipepper]

You're right, there were some lopsided finals, but I don't think it was the seeding.  After about 1:30pm Saturday afternoon the times posted were ridiculously fast.  The team I race with posted times at 11:00am and 1:00pm-ish that were 1 second different.  Teams that raced after that got steadily faster.  I think there was an average improvement of 10-15seconds, which is an enormous amount of time.  For example, in their first race Ssssteam Heat went 2:20, but in their second race they went 2:06.  You can see how this would throw off the second day rankings.  I'm not trying to dis anyone, but if Blu By U raced in the later afternoon they probably got the benefit of the improved conditions, and therefore got bumped up a division ahead of a team that maybe raced earlier in the afternoon and didn't get the benefit.  If you examine the results you can see the faster conditions slowly speed up over about an hour as teams got 2, 5, and then 10 and 15 seconds faster than their morning times. This same advantage didn't hold up on the Sunday as times stayed more or less consistent from am to pm.  I also don't remember this happening in previous years, so likely it was some anomoly.  I guess my only point is that it may not have been the seeding that produced the two or three less competitive finals results. 

[alcanranker]

I guess that is why Alcan has pools to reduce.  It reduces the tide effect.  If you notice the Alcan schedules all of the teams in a pool within an hour of each other, seems fair especially on tidal water. 

BTW, Alcan used 9 rankers this year to seed teams, we definitely do try and seed appropriately.  If you have ever tried to seed it is a fair bit of work, for those that did it this year, the paddlers should thank you for all the time and effort you put in.

I am sure Nanamio tries to seed appropriately so they just need to split them into pools now and draw so many from each pool to move into the various divisions.  If they use pools then the seeding must be done as best as they can or you would get lopsided finishes (unless some teams threw a race or two, but nobody would do that, right).  LMAO

Until next year's Alcan, paddle hard everyone.

[Lethal Weapon]

There were a few lopsided races but over all I beileve the heats were seeded to the best of the Race organizers knowledge. I for know it is pretty hard to predict what to expect of an out of town team (IE the Eye of the Dragon.) and them and FM won thier heats even though they were not ranked. Save On Foods got edged out by The Eye and were forced to race the GD in the their next race so that basically knocked them to the lower divisions. You can't really tell what teams bring to out of town festivals as well as many times not alltheir paddlers can make it.
The tides were very fast as well and when I was steering one race the boat got grounded even though I was not far from the green markers! LOL (In fact I think S&S dragonballs had to get out and push!  )
There were more close races than blow outs so I think everyone was pretty happy. Thats racing!

[rb]

Nanaimo ended up with some close races and some lopsided races. In the future I believe that there can be more close races and fewer lopsided ones.

The biggest factor in getting close races is the accuracy of the ranking ahead of time. I agree that using times can be part of the problem especially in tidal waters. Like Alcanranker said using pools can help, or the other thing that Alcan does is compare the team time to the average time of the teams in the heat instead of just the actual time. And you'll get some teams that change lineups or teams that merge so you can't fault ranking those incorrectly. But the more effort in ranking accurately the better the races.

Alcan puts a lot of effort into ranking and they rank ALL the teams, not just the top teams, so that Rec D and Rec E races are close too. The result is good close races on Sunday. I give them an A or even an A+ for ranking. That's the standard that all organizers should aspire to.

GO did an ok job of ranking, I don't want to roast them, but they didn't do as good a job of it as could be so let's not whitewash it either.

If you want close races it takes a lot of effort ahead of time to make sure it happens.

I give GO a C in the seeding category in Nanaimo.

I look forward to more improvements in racing thanks to suggestions from everyone on this forum.


rb

[kryssee]

I too had a great time! My only complaint was the lack of women's events. Last year, we competed against mixed teams on the Sat. and against women's on the Sunday for the semi's and finals. Which seemed to really work out. This year, we raced against only 1 woman's team the whole weekend (other than the top 4 women's at the end of Sat.) and had to fight to stay in it against mixed. We ended up in the Gold A Final, and got 4th by a matter of seconds. Yes, we had an awesome weeked, yes, we had some of our best times, yes, we beat some mixed teams, but we really didn't have a chance to medal. I think they should also take in to consideration that there are some all women's teams out there and use Sunday to pit women against women!

[soggybottom]

I would have agreed with paddlerbums predictions for the top 10 in Nanaimo except that sssteamheat was paddling with only 18 all weekend. It's been a long time since they placed in a Jade div. Having said that I still beleive the officials tried to place teams to the best of their ability; however it does seem odd that all 4 Jade final A's times beat out all 4 Diamond B's times. Special mention:  Kudos to fifth moon for an awesome first race on Sunday!!  A great event; can't wait for next year.

[kryssee]

Oh, I also forgot to say..YAY for the women's race on Sat.! That was a great addition! So, thanks for that! We very much appreciated the honor of being able to race in it!

[centurian]

Yes definately a great weekend. My first festival ever. Now to address the ranking issue, having not been to a festival before, it appears that the organizers did a fairly decent job. One thing that everyone should take into consideration though, is there are many new teams, most from out of town so it is very hard to predict how they will do. I know with our team, the majority of our boat was made up of "Festival Virgins". And a few from Spirit Dragons who were not going to the festival.(Thank you to them for all thier help and completing our boat!) We made some mistakes our first race, corrected in the second and came second by 1.23 seconds. Because of this, we placed lower than we probably should have been seeded. Our first semi we did well and if you noticed, we didnt win the gold by much, due to a lost boat but managed to recover. Thus is the peculiarities of racing. I think if you look at many of the times and look at what happened in those races or those leading up to them, you could probably talk to the teams and find out the reasons for the differences, but the organizers cannot base seeding on contributing factors or they would give the appearance of favourtism.

On that note, I do look forward to moving up a couple of seeds for Victoria, and through practice, I know our team will do it. Good luck and see you on the water.

[StraightLine]

I would have agreed with paddlerbums predictions for the top 10 in Nanaimo except that sssteamheat was paddling with only 18 all weekend. It's been a long time since they placed in a Jade div. Having said that I still beleive the officials tried to place teams to the best of their ability; however it does seem odd that all 4 Jade final A's times beat out all 4 Diamond B's times. Special mention:  Kudos to fifth moon for an awesome first race on Sunday!!  A great event; can't wait for next year.

There is something screwy with the posted times for the Diamond B final.  There is no way we (TD Lightning) had a 2:33 race.  Maybe 2:23.  I was running a stop watch for the purpose of calling the race piece and while not accurate, it was around 2:26 when I stopped the watch after crossing the finish line.

The posted results are even more unbelievable when the race immediately after (Diamond A final) posted a 2:18 and 2:19 for the top two times.

Otherwise, it was a great event.  Look forward to going back next year.

StraightLine.