Sometimes if you just wait around, the circle gets completed and you can marvel at the unwitting ways things happen. Things just go round and round.

It was a while back that, with encouragement from Nick Kennedy, I, as the USHPA Competition Committee Chairman, got the USHPA to adopt a Sport Class. This allowed pilots who were not in the top twenty pilots ranked by NTSS to fly in the Sport Class. The idea was that less experienced pilots flying perhaps king posted gliders could compete against each other in shorter tasks without having to taking on those infamous "factory sponsored" pilots on their latest topless gliders.

I didn't restrict it to pilots flying king posted gliders and developed a complete handicapping system (based on polars) to allow pilots flying topless gliders to compete in this class if they wanted to. We never had to apply the handicap though, because the very few pilots who flew topless gliders always seemed to do relatively poorly, so it wasn't a concern. Mainly the kingposted guys duked it out.

After we got this going and the Guatemalan pilots came and flew in the Florida Ridge meet and at the Nationals at Big Spring, they got very excited about the idea of Sport Class. They felt that it would very much help their pilots to get into competitions.

They took the idea to the CIVL Bureau and the CIVL Plenary and after two years got it approved by CIVL as a valid class. Then John Aldridge wrote to me to see how the USHPA defined the class and I told him about our system. He decided to restrict the Sport Class to just king posted gliders. Fine by me, it is close enough, and that is in the right spirit.

Well, it seems that the USHPA Competition Committee, not having any institutional memory, or at least not a very good one, seemed to think that the USHPA didn't have a definition of Sport Class, and that they needed one. Where did they go at the Fall USHPA BOD meeting? Well to the CIVL definition, of course.

And so things came full circle. As has been said, it\\'s turtles all the way down.

This appears not to have been implemented yet, but is part of a draft plan. More on that later.