posted Oct 6th, 2008 - The World Meet 2008 included once again a meeting with representatives of IPC's Formation Skydiving committee, judges and competitors. It was held after the last competition jump and before the award ceremony. The committee's chair, Australian 8-way competitor Fiona McEachern, had scheduled the meeting and was heading it in Maubeuge.

Two major topics were on the agenda and dominated the discussion: the application of the freeze frame image at the end of the working time and how to use slower motion for judging in the future.

Both topics have already been discussed for quite a while in the Formation Skydiving community and at some major events between competitors and judges, as well. It has been a controversial discussion on both topics ever since they surfaced.

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The freeze frame issue is the much younger one and only became a popular topic when the IPC Committee introduced a rule change for the 2008 season.

The intention of the rule change was to end the often heated discussion when formations that looked complete on the freeze frame were counted as scoring formations and others were not. The NSL News picked up some of these situations at the World Meet 2008 and brought them to the attention of the audience (see story on 13 August 2008).

The revised freeze frame rule was supposed to "clarify how freeze frame (and centrepoints) are assessed":

IPC's Freeze Frame Rule

5.5 For Judging purposes, the stationary contact of grips on the freeze frame will be assessed using only the two dimensional video evidence as framed.

However, the committee's message of neutralizing this part of the judging process did not get through to all judges at the 2008 competitions and not even to the judges at the World Meet 2008. The freeze frame rule was applied this year as if no change of the 5.5 definition ever happened.

The discussion during the meeting in Maubeuge revealed that the judges did not just ignore the rule change. There was a high degree of misunderstanding at the same time. The actual definition of the rule did not clarify enough how freeze frame should be assessed.

The IPC's Formation Skydiving committee intended to avoid any interpretation whether the last formation within working time and on the judging screen, the freeze frame, is complete or not. There was not supposed to be any room for speculation what happened before and possibly after the freeze frame. The scoring point had to be rewarded if any formation looked complete.

The new rule did not say that clearly enough, and the judges neither understood the freeze frame rule with the original IPC intention nor liked it or would have liked it. Fact is that the judging at the World Meet 2008 was the same as in previous years before the rule change.

The interpretation of the freeze frame could easily make a difference and decide the outcome of a competition, as the World Meet 2008 clearly demonstrated. The Open Class competition and the competition in the female 4-way category both ended with 1-point differences between gold and silver medals.

It was necessary and crucial to revisit the freeze frame rule at the IPC meeting in Maubeuge and fix misunderstandings and different interpretations. Result of the discussion of this topic is to remove the new and apparently misleading definition and go back to the situation before the rule change.

The judges were asking in the meeting for the freedom to use their whole impression of the video to make the call whether a formation was good or not at freeze frame time. They did not feel comfortable with just counting the grips and disregarding flaws they were sure about - even if the freeze frame image would not show them.

They said that the evaluation of the action around the freeze frame is an important part of their judgement, and they would like to apply it without restrictions.

The present teams and competitors at the meeting did not really have a set position on either side of the rule. The main concern was the fact that there was uncertainty how the rule would be applied. Once again, there were several situations where a freeze frame formation looked complete, the audience expected the scoring point to be counted, and it wasn't.

The competitors expressed that they are simply looking for the same evaluation and interpretation for each team, no matter which rule would be applied. There was a questionmark behind this important issue in Maubeuge due to the different expectations after the rule change.

However, all parties eventually agreed to give back full freeze frame authority to the judges, without any restrictions or limitations how to evaluate the last frame on the screen. In fact, the majority of the competitors at the meeting also seemed to feel uncomfortable with the possibility that an apparently incomplete formation would have to be scored as a correct formation.

The IPC committee plans to remove the added paragraph and go back to the rules and interpretation of the past years. The NSL News will follow up with the latest development of the slower speed topic very soon.