Should venues with no Live Timing be awarded championship events?

[kjsway]

I've seen this in years past with JO events in IMD and Far West venues that have no capability (or interest) in providing Live Timing for races. This weekend is another example where the Western Region championships are being held in Schweitzer with no Live Timing capability. They posted the men's results from yesterday (Friday) a day late and still no women's results. No results from today (Saturday) either. In the mean time every championship race being run this weekend in the Central and East regions are on live timing. In cases like this the Western Region looks like a backwater in terms of technological capability. 

[gerdt]

Live timing should be a requirement for hosting championship events.

If you are new to Live Timing, here is the link to today's men's DH J2 Olympics training run today: http://www.live-timing.com/race2.php?r=18783&u=60

Here are links to the PC J3 qualifier GSes today:

http://www.live-timing.com/race2.php?r=18785&u=10&maxr=10

http://www.live-timing.com/race2.php?r=18784&u=60

[skifast]

No They should not, for me I would rather that no event was run without live timing

[mango]

This is about holding a ski race it should not be basied on todays technology. After all its not the World Cup it is a kids race and little league parents will just have to wait for results.

[skifast]

If you are a parent that is always able to be at a race. Live timing really would not matter. However if you have multiple racers live timing is the best. How about the grandparents that are in other parts of the country, or in other contries. Live timing is a great way for them to be a part of the racing.

[mango]

Ski Fast

You have a valid point, we have a large number of Little League parents and it creates lots of timing issues, such as my little Johnny skied much faster than that his time is wrong,ETC....and the parent storms into the timing room

[cpoepping]

Lets face it The  Western region is way behind times not only as far as technology they need to embrace things like Live Timming. We also need to make Venues safer with fencing and padding go to another region and see what types of protection are being used.

[Flynn]

A championship event is about the venue.  So it should not matter whether or not it has live timing capabilities.  Being able to watch times as they come in from somewhere else in the world has nothing to do with whether or not the event is a well run race.  If you have a child in the race, and cannot attend, my guess is your kid has a cell phone and you can get results after every run from them.  If you just want race results because you are interested, the results show up that night for some events and the next day for most others on the IMD site, USSA site, or FIS site depending on the event.
Junior racing is about learning, having fun, and competing in fair races which are tailored to the ability of the group that will be in attendance.  If the venue is also tailored to spectators, then that is a bonus, not a necessity.

[kjsway]

Some good comments here. When your kids are at the J5, J4 and even J3 levels you get to attend most of the races. When they move up to the J2 and J1 it's virtually impossible to attend the greater number of races that cover a larger geographic area, so in those instances Live Timing is nice to have. Having said that I will tell you that a number of spectators who are at venues that have Live Timing position themselves up somewhere on the mountain (vs. the finish line) to see as much of the course as possible and follow the Live Timing results on their phone. Also at Live Timing races I see team coaches on the course calling in conditions as well as times, again from their cell phone's Live Timing results. Live Timing also comes in handy at the race to see the start order for the first run and the "flip" order for the second run.
The main issue here is that from a technology standpoint it's not the equivalent of "splitting the atom" to provide live timing results. It's easy, all you need is a wireless signal, some races are actually run off a cell phone with internet service. Once the race begins everything is transmitted automatically, it's no extra work. Even if a course has no internet access the results can be uploaded once the file gets back to the club computer. So if the Western Region and/or IMD are awarding Championship races to venues for 2011, Live Timing should be one of the criteria for awarding that event.