Thanks to Will from Affinity Rowing Club for sharing this article.
It was about half an hour before the start of the race when Ben pulled me aside and demanded some answers. Why, he asked, were we not adjusting course times with a proper handicap to allow boats like his—a beautiful cutter named Betty—to compete on equal footing with the Cornish gigs? Flustered, I replied that, as this was our first attempt at hosting the Head of the Ouse, we hadn’t yet considered that sort of technicality. Needless to say, Ben was not placated.
That was five years ago, and since then Ben and I have worked closely together, building the Sussex event—alongside many others—to the point where twenty fixed-seat rowing craft, of seven different types, raced against each other this autumn on the 10km course from Newhaven to Lewes.
After the un-handicapped race of 2019, we tried adapting the time adjustments used in the Great River Race in London. But when we analysed the data, it was clear that this approach wasn’t entirely fair to some of the boats competing in the Head of the Ouse. Dividing the time adjustments by three—the HOTO route being roughly one-third the length of the Great River Race—required estimating the typical crew’s completion time. And our estimates weren’t that accurate.
Instead, with the help of Martino from Tudor Sailing Club in Portsmouth, we developed the Ouse Yardstick—a handicapping system for fixed-seat boats that uses statistical analysis of results data to produce OY numbers for each boat type. Each boat’s elapsed time (the time taken from start to finish) is multiplied by its OY number, allowing boats of different classes to be more fairly compared with each other. For example, the OY number for a Celtic Longboat is 0.903; applying this to an elapsed time of 50’21” produces an adjusted time of 45’28”. As the ‘anchor’ class for the OY system, wooden Cornish gigs have an OY number of 1.
The statistical approach we’re using means that the more results data that’s fed into the model, the closer the OY numbers will get to being “correct.” Because of this, OY numbers are revised each winter, with new numbers published on the Ouse Yardstick website each spring.
At the start of 2024, the Three Harbours group of fixed-seat rowing clubs, based around Chichester, Langstone, and Portsmouth harbours, adopted the Ouse Yardstick for events held this year. We’re now hoping organisers of other mixed-class, fixed-seat rowing races will contribute their race results to the Ouse Yardstick project.
In addition to seeking more results data, we’re hoping Cornish gig clubs across the country can help us with a tricky question: which is faster, a wooden or a GRP gig? Our data suggests that wooden gigs are inherently faster; this year’s OY number for GRP Cornish gigs was 0.913.
Please get in touch if your club would be interested in setting up speed trials to compare wooden and GRP gigs this winter — the email address is ouseyardstick@gmail.com. Your club’s data could help improve fair competition in future mixed-class races, making the OY numbers even more accurate for 2025.
For more information see the Ouse Yardstick website at https://ouseyardstick.univer.se
Yardstick is great. With so many gigs, we have the ability to converge on a fairly accurate number across lots of different conditions – that is one of the things about handicaps – you will get a slightly different figure on a calm river compared to rough seas where a heavier boat may punch through the waves better.
Hopefully the yardstick will evolve and become more widely accepted (at least for smaller events) as it will allow smaller clubs to participate more – for example, if you only have one wooden gig and it is spending months being stripped back and thus out of action, then you cannot compete.