Second Place

The Kadizzles are back home with the grass needing cut.  A long smokey drive across Washington, Montana, and North Dakota. The planet is melting and no one notices.  Kadizzzle has seen the dead reefs in Belize, The forest on fire in the Northwest, and the insane floods in Texas, yet the magical Republicans deny there is a problem.

Off subject already.  The race, the sailboat race is scheduled for Saturday. Kadizzle has put his team together. There will be a nice trophy of pure silver.  Now the strange part, the Kadizzle team has been prohibited from winning.  Last year before the race Kadizzle was told that " If you come in first you will get the second place trophy".   The problem is the good ship won in past years by an astounding margin.  This was the result of a fast boat, and a good captain.  Well not really, we had good starts and more important good luck.  Now the puzzling part.  If the second place winner gets the first place trophy, it seems that it would be easy to drop back to second place. Maybe not.  When sailboats race and they are of different make and model the boats are scored by a Performance Handicap Racing system.  This means a fast boat must win by a margin.  For example we might have to beat all the other boats by twenty minutes.  So if you deliberately came in second you would have to carefully cross the finish line by some exact margin.  Maybe we could wait at the finish line and let the second place boat cross.  That would not guarantee us second in this strange system because we would have to beat boat number three by a specific margin.  Trying to figure out how to come in second becomes very complicated. Add to the this the fact that they might deny us the trophy anyway and we have a mess on our hands.  Actually the idea is to get more people racing, so we don't really care.  As long as people have fun and learn something about sailboat racing it is mission accomplished.