Winning strategies

Measured in kilometres per hour · higher is better

How fast the pilot moves down the course when they are on a glide. The value is the duration-weighted mean ground speed over every glide after the start, which is the glide distance divided by the glide time. A higher value means more ground covered in each minute between climbs.

Measured in percent · no expected direction

How low the pilot goes before the next climb. A high value is a race with height in reserve, and a low value is a flight that goes down near the ground. We take each pair of climbs that the pilot made after the start, and we find the lowest point between them. We keep only the gaps that go down 100 m or more, because a top-up between two climbs is not a descent. We do not count a sled run or the glide to goal, because the pilot made no climb after them. The value is the median of those low points, as a percentage of the day's working band. 0% is where the lowest tenth of the field's climbs started, and 100% is where the highest tenth stopped. Thus a negative value shows that the pilot went lower than almost all of the field. The pilot must have two or more of these descents. There is no expected direction. The sign of the correlation says whether height in reserve pays.

Measured in percent · no expected direction

How much of the lift of the pilot another pilot found first. The value is the share of their climbs after the start where another pilot was already established in the same thermal when they arrived. Established means 30 s or more into the climb, and still climbing. A high value means they mostly climb on the markers of other pilots. A low value means they find their own air. There is no expected direction. A marker is free information, but it puts a pilot where the last climb was, and not where the next one is.

Measured in ratio · higher is better

Whether the pilot found better air on glide than the other pilots on the same leg. For each completed speed-section leg, we take the pilot's glide-phase L/D. That is the path distance divided by the net altitude lost during the glides, and we skip a leg that loses less than 100 m. We divide it by the median L/D of the field on that same leg, and then average over the legs. 1.10 means the pilot glided 10% further for each metre lost than the usual pilot on those legs.

Measured in ratio · no expected direction

How optimistic the pilot was about their final glide. A pilot wins or loses a task by the height at which they leave the last climb. At the last climb of the pilot before ESS, or before the landing, we divide the distance to goal by their height above goal. That is the glide ratio they committed to. 8 means they left and needed 8:1 to make goal. The value counts only when that climb ended within 1.5 times the length of the last course leg longer than 1 km from goal — when ESS and goal share a waypoint, the zero-length hop between them is not that leg. There is no expected direction: a marginal glide wins if it connects, and loses if it does not.