Copying last year’s race documents is a quick and easy way to set up an event that has been run before, but it can come with consequences without the right attention to detail.

Recent examples of race documents for a national and state championships demonstrated the folly of copying and pasting previous race documents without the right care. The former was sailing instructions for a high profile international class and their national championships held in Tasmania. The latter was in a notice of race for a state championship of another premier international class in Queensland.

The sailing instructions for the national championship for Class A (so not to embarrass anyone) we noticed the standard clause for disclaimer of liability attributing the wrong class association;

“28.2 None of the Organising Authority, International 14 Association, their officers, members, volunteers, servants or agents accept any responsibility…”

Upon enquiring why the International 14 Association were disclaiming any liability for Class A’s national championship there was some bemusement as the organisers realised that the clause must have been copied from an event many years ago and would have probably appeared incorrectly in several years of Class A national championship sailing instructions. Interestingly the disclaimer of liability in the notice of race for Class A's national championships had the correct class association mentioned. Whether or not the incorrect clause would have been a problem if tested is a matter of conjecture and gratefully we’ll never know.

The notice of race for the state championship of Class B (also to avoid embarrassment) came to our attention during an appeal. The notice of race stated quite clearly that there would be a properly constituted and approved national jury. Generally, competitors would note this and not consider appealing a hearing’s decision. Fortunately, in this case the appellant either hadn’t read the race documents, which an experienced but cynical race official might think likely or the competitor was simply aware that it was a protest committee and knew to appeal. This is a little more complex as the erroneous clause in the notice of race is misleading and would easily lead a competitor to think they had no recourse to appeal which is quite unfair on the competitors. The clause also caused the appeal panel some consternation as they had to satisfy themselves that this was an error and that the appeal could proceed.

In each case a careful review of the race documents would have led the race committee to identify the need to change those clauses copied and pasted.

We strongly recommend that the race documents be:
1.    Checked annually for changes in the event’s circumstances
2.    Rewritten from new every four years using World Sailing’s current guides in the Racing Rules of Sailing 
These reviews will ensure that the race documents presented to competitors will always provide a clean set of up to date rules.

The guides for Notice of Race and Sailing Instructions can be found in Appendix J of the Racing Rules of Sailing at https://cdn.revolutionise.com.au/site/l7njxnmon2hnjcry.pdf#page=129.

By Glen Stanaway https://www.sailing.org.au/about/ourstaff/.