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Manifesto

Paragliding competitions are incredible events. You get to race with dozens of pilots across majestic landscapes, using gear which is nothing short of an engineering marvel. However, there are three important limitations:

  • scoring is obscure
  • competitions are expensive
  • weather plays an important part

The goal of Syrac is to offer an alternative to regular paragliding competitions by proposing solutions to these issues.

Scoring

Both local and international XC competitions have settled for an ever-changing way of computing the score of each pilot for a given flight. Scoring formulas have reached complexity levels such that you cannot know who is the winner of a task or a competition when you land.

Pilots have to wait for GPS tracks to be processed by closed-source software implementing loosely-defined specifications1 in order to elect their winner. Even though the reasons for introducing such complexity can be justified, it can also be argued that the evolution of scoring has hurt competitiveness.

Syrac addresses this issue by coming back to the essence of racing: time. The only thing that matters in a leaderboard is the time it took a pilot to complete the task from the Start of Speed Section (SSS) to the End of Speed Section (ESS).

Cost

Paragliding is an expensive sport. Equipment constitutes a significant budget, and has to be renewed fairly often. Local competitions are fairly affordable, but international competitions often involve long-haul flights, hotel bookings, logistics costs as well as registration fees. This cost of entry restricts high-level competition access to relatively wealthy pilots.

Syrac is free. Use it, give us your feedback, and we can make it better together. Everyone is welcome. We don't sell your data, we don't force you to see dumb ads, and we never will.

Weather

Competitions are scheduled months in advance so pilots can only hope for favourable weather conditions during the event. In the past, several international events spanning multiple weeks have had as little as a couple of flyable days.

Syrac tasks are here forever. Once a task is created, anyone can try to get the fastest time in as many attempts as they wish. This allows pilots who are not able fly every day to still be able to compete for the top of the leaderboard.

We hope Syrac offers an interesting alternative to XC competitions and permanent rankings, enabling pilots from all backgrounds to race together.

  1. See FAI Sporting Code or PWCA rules. ↩