The Swiss Paragliding League Commission has decided to adopt Time-Based Scoring (TBS) for all of its 2022 competitions.
TBS was developed by Maxime Bellemin and Joerg Ewald, two long-time competitors and coaches, who want to replace the system mainly in use today, GAP, with something that is “easy to understand, transparent, and suitable for a racing sport”.
The TBS system’s most obvious difference to GAP is that performance is expressed in time – hours, minutes and seconds – rather than points.
Announcing the news that Switzerland was adopting TBS for its competitions, Joerg explained in an email: “TBS development started over ten years ago and has been available as an alternative scoring system in FS, the most widely-used competition scoring software, since 2019.
“Many competitions have been scored in parallel with both GAP and TBS, and a small number of competitions have been scored exclusively with TBS. This has allowed us to demonstrate the feasibility of scoring based on time only, to showcase its application in real life, and to fine-tune it for special cases like tasks with no pilots in goal and stopped tasks.”
He added that TBS “is now ready for the big stage. The Swiss competitions, consisting of Swiss Cup and Swiss League Cup weekend competitions, and the Swiss Open, will certainly offer that.”
More information on TBS can be found at www.timebasedscoring.org. Organisers interested in adopting TBS are invited to contact Joerg Ewald, who will answer questions and offer support.
All 2022 Swiss paragliding competitions are FAI Category 2 events, and therefore open to the public. Registration for them is through www.swissleague.ch.
