If it ain't broke, don't fix it.This was a comment made to me by one competitor at this year's BIRC. The reference was due to the problems we were experiencing with the new race system, which led to us falling behind in the race schedule.This is a philosophy I am not totally adverse to but, in this particular instance, I think we were right to try the new system.What were the benefits to the competitors who, at the end of the day, are what BIRC is all about?The main benefits were related to the graphics on the monitor. They were bigger and clearer. You could see where you were in a race as the monitor named the person in the lead, the person immediately in front and behind you and by how far, thus replicating what you would see if you were actually racing down a course.Everyone was connected to the race system, which meant for the first time we were able to show on the big screen how people on the back rows were getting on.Competitors were able to immediately recover their split times by pressing the change display button. In the past when only the front rows were connected, the times of competitors on the back rows had to be entered manually which had the potential for error as well as delaying the results. Because everyone was connected to the race system we could give results immediately without error.So these were our motives for the change, but could we have managed it better? With the benefit of hindsight, yes I think we can and you can rest assured we will be going over this for the next couple of weeks to ensure we do. Areas we will be looking at will include the race start, the race schedule and the medal ceremony. We had to change the start procedure and drop the audio ROW. The reason for this was that the race system can only support 40 machines and so, with 120 machines in the hall, there were three separate race systems running. The time between Attention and ROW was random on each system so we could not synchronise the ROW to appear on all 120 machines. We thought this would lead to lots of false starts so we decided to start each system separately starting from the back.There were very few actual false starts, no more than usual, so this worked but the problem for competitors was they were unaware of this process until they turned up on the day. The explanation for this was we did not decide to go with the new system until the end of exhaustive testing, which finished late Saturday night.One advantage of the three separate race systems was that we could switch across from one to the other to keep abreast of how people were progressing, a facility we did not manage very well on the day.The reason we fell behind was that between races the system does a diagnostic check on all machines including checking the condition of the batteries. Obviously this takes considerably longer on 120 machines. Some competitors in some races were taking over 10 minutes to run so with the change over and diagnostic checks perhaps a race schedule of 15 minutes was overly optimistic. The constraints of running such a big event on one day are that there is a limit on how early you can start and how late you can finish. This almost predetermines the time between races. The area that always gets squeezed is the medal ceremony. No one is more aware than us of the importance of receiving your medals both for the recipients and their families. We had to move this out of the main arena this year but because races were running behind schedule it caused big problems for the ceremonies.I want to thank all who supported BIRC this year for your patience and understanding on the day and welcome any comments on how you think we can do better. But that's not to say there were not some great things going on. Where else would you see competitors from age 10 to 94, Olympic medallists and paraplegics all competing in the same arena on the same day? In all, over 2250 competitors took part and got their results, which made this the biggest indoor rowing race ever. ____________________________________________________FEEDBACKYou like? You dislike? You want to write something for the newsletter?Want to mock us on making a basic error? Make sure to tell us at [email protected], of course, you could always say something at our message board: http://www.therowingcompany.com/forum/ _____________________________________________________BACK ISSUESHave a blast from the past by going to http://www.therowingcompany.com/news/newsletter_archive.php and checking out the hidden treasures of the Indoor Rowing News. New issues are posted on the release date of the following newsletter.