— Lee <poisonfrog@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Hi Kris,
…
> I was wondering if you could give me a little info about how the rules
> and scoring work for the comps. Is it like the same as observed
> trials?
The old version of the unitrials rules was fairly similar to bike trials,
except for the removal of the 5 point rule (two 2-foot dabs would
eliminate you instead of just one).
The new version of the rules is not at all the same, and is much more
exciting in my opinion. I’ve mentioned this ruleset to several trials
competition organizers and there is some motivation to organize a few bike
events around these rules as well. The rules are based loosely around the
format used for bouldering competitions in rock climbing, and can be found
at <http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~kholm/2002%20Trials%20rules.html>
Basically the difference is that the new rules are based around a course
consisting of many short sections. Each section is given a point value
corresponding to it’s difficulty. Riders have a set amount of time to try
to clean as many of the problems as they can. They get bonus points for
cleaning the problem first-try, but otherwise they can try any of the
problems as many times as they wish. The point is to encourage success
instead of penalizint dabs (like with bike trials), which should result in
more exciting riding styles and higher technical standards in general.
The rules also contain the basis for the U-System for rating difficulties
for trials problems. In my opinion this has way more potential for
quantifying trials difficulty than any competition can. The U-System would
contain difficulty ratings loosely based around familiar trials problems
(everyday objects such as railings, railroad tracks, picnic tables etc),
and qualitatively extended to other more obscure problems as riders get a
feeling for how hard they find a particular problem to be.
-Kris.
Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with
Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/