Provisional vs Final; When do results become “Final”?

At NSC, we do not post results as “provisional” or “final”; instead, results are always posted with a title of “Results as of [time] on [date]”. There are two reasons for this. The first is that if results are posted as “provisional”, then the expectation is that someone will later change that to show “final”. That adds a second step, which often doesn’t happen. However, the more significant issue is that it is very difficult to define when results become truly final.

There are occasionally errors in the results when they are first posted, which is why the scoring inquiry process exists. Racers are allowed 3 days to submit scoring inquiries that are based on the posted results, and allowing for a couple of days for the scorer to update things, that means the results will occasionally be updated in the week after they are first posted.

If there is a protest or request for redress, for our Interclub racing, those are typically heard one week later, as explained here, thus further extending the time over which results might get revised.

However, whenever there is a protest or a request for redress, parties have 7 days to submit an appeal, per Appendix R (see the Sail Canada prescription dated 2022-03-10 that changes the 15 days to 7). If that happens, the protest committee chair might not even hear about the appeal until contacted weeks later by Sail Canada or the provincial sailing association. After that, it might take 2-4 months for the appeals committee to reach a decision. Since appeals in Canada are generally heard by provincial appeals committees, any party could further appeal to Sail Canada, adding more months to the process. So in reality, it could be many months before the results truly become final.

At regattas, the timeframe for responding to scoring inquiries and hearing protests is significantly compressed, and regatta organizers are generally quite confident in the results by the time they present the awards. But if there are any protests or requests for redress, unless there is an International Jury, in which case protest decisions are not subject to appeal, then it might be naively optimistic for the organizers to publish the results as “final” at the end of the regatta.

The author would prefer that Sailwave default to showing “Results as of @ on #”, but until such change is implemented, scorers need to set that as the title when publishing results.

Page updated: 2022-09-09.