Judging Controversy - Part 1 of 3

[Joe Lachowski]

Derek. First of all, don't shoot the messenger. I really didn't want to post 
this, but here it is. Below is Eric's response to me after he realized he 
made a mistake in his sequence of events.


From: Eric Henderson

Joe,
         I'm sorry if I misled you and very sorry that I was I was a bit off 
geographically in my recall and impression about Ron VP being kicked off the 
panel in "Australia". Shame on me for not doing my homework properly.

This is what I believe actually took place:-

Ron VP was the USA FAI-F3A judge in Japan in 1995. I don't know how he was 
selected or who recommended him. I am informed that after the event was over 
the judges performances were evaluated.

The Judges numbers were crunched and it looked like Ron was favoring US 
pilots. Nothing was done to the change 1995 results.

What did happen was that the USA, namely the AMA, was penalized and was not 
allowed to have a USA judge on the panel in the Poland 1997 
championships.(This should be confirmable by Ron Chidgey - the predecessor 
to Skinner).

So we went four years until the Pensacola WC's where Earl Haury did the job, 
then Mike Dumphy did it twice etc. and the rest you know.

I have always felt that It would be better if those concerned just came 
clean instead of the selective "paragraph" answering, but that is their free 
choice.

It is my fundamental belief that you can make much better decisions if you 
are given as much information as is practical. In the case of the AMA 
selecting a USA judge for the FAI-F3A world championships, the history is 
important to know. It lets you to understand and anticipate the AMA 
reactions to individuals. You can also see why they need to maintain some 
control and keep the standards where they have returned.

I liked what Maureen said about the other properties that a USA 
representative needed to have. It is a highly visible position and the judge 
needs to almost be more of a statesman than an accomplished judge.

There are, however, obvious minimum requirements of experience to be a world 
championship judge. In the old days you needed to have a couple of FAI 
finals and team trials under your belt to even begin to be considered.

My own experience at this years team trials was that you also needed to be 
very good at judging unknown schedules.  The current rating system needs a 
few tweaks to take the above into account before you can go head to head 
with the AMA.

Regards,

Eric.




>From: "Derek Koopowitz" <derekkoopowitz at earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: discussion at nsrca.org
>To: <discussion at nsrca.org>
>Subject: RE: Judging Controversy - Part 1 of 3
>Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 22:35:58 -0700
>
>Joe,
>
>What I don't see from you or Eric Henderson is an apology to Ron Van Putte
>for the blatant lies that were written in this forum about Ron's apparent
>removal from the WC's judging pool during the WC.  That, to me, is an
>egregious error made on your part for posting a total erroneous message 
>from
>Eric and then for not stepping up to the plate and apologizing for it.
>
>Now... That is too bad for this hobby of ours.
>
>
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