Distance sailed and your rating

It was on a Facebook post by yacht designer and past Seahorse magazine editor Julian Everitt where the comments included this observation by John Sweeney regarding handicap racing:

Sailing is structurally unique among competitive sports because it does not operate on a fixed or identical field of play. In nearly every other timed athletic competition, the course distance is known, static, and identical for all competitors, such that performance can be measured as a function of speed over a common path. In sailing, by contrast, the geographic course is only nominally defined.

The actual distance sailed by each boat is neither fixed nor equal, and is instead a consequence of vessel design, aerodynamic and hydrodynamic performance, tactical choices, wind gradients, current interaction, and rule-constrained maneuvering. This makes sailing the only major competitive sport in which the effective course length varies materially by competitor, yet results are scored as though distance were constant.

All modern handicap and rating systems—including PHRF, IRC, ORR, and ORC—are built on a common implicit assumption: that elapsed time, when adjusted by a rating derived from design potential or empirical performance, reasonably approximates relative performance over a nominal course length.

That assumption only holds if differences in sailed distance are minimal, random, or evenly distributed across the fleet. In reality, they are none of these. Distance sailed is highly correlated with boat type, displacement, sail plan, righting moment, maneuvering cost, and optimal VMG angles. As a result, the assumption of a shared course length introduces a systematic distortion rather than random error.

Boat design directly affects sailed geometry. Light-displacement, high-performance boats typically sail higher and lower, tack more frequently, and incur greater path length in exchange for higher instantaneous VMG. Heavier boats often sail flatter angles with fewer maneuvers and shorter overall tracks. Deep-draft or high-keel boats may avoid shallow water or adverse current bands accessible to others, while planing designs seek pressure and angles unavailable to displacement hulls.

These differences can result in materially different sailed distances between competitors who nevertheless finish within minutes or seconds of one another. Current handicap frameworks do not recognize or normalize this divergence. Instead, they treat elapsed time as if it were accrued over equivalent geometry.

Critically, existing systems correct time, not distance. Ratings adjust for theoretical speed potential, sail area, displacement, stability, or empirical performance history, but they do not correct for the geometric inefficiency imposed by tacks, gybes, leeway, or forced deviations that arise from design constraints.

Two boats may produce similar corrected times while one has sailed a longer path at higher VMG and the other a shorter path at lower speed. Treating these performances as equivalent is mathematically incorrect if the objective is to compare true sailing efficiency or athletic performance rather than conformity to a rating model.

The severity of this issue varies by system but is universal in principle.

• PHRF, being empirical and coarse-grained, is the most sensitive to distance distortion, as it assumes fleet-average behavior and implicitly rewards boats that minimize distance rather than maximize performance.

• IRC, while based on VPP methods and internally consistent, still evaluates performance against a nominal course and therefore disadvantages designs whose optimization relies on frequent maneuvering in unstable conditions.

• ORR is more physics-driven and detailed in its modeling of stability and power, yet it still corrects time against a theoretical course rather than the one actually sailed.

• ORC, the most transparent and computationally sophisticated of the group, offers wind-indexed scoring and multiple performance curves, but even ORC does not measure or normalize the actual distance sailed by each competitor. Across all four systems, the common flaw is the absence of path-length correction.

This problem has persisted not because it is unknown, but because it has historically been impractical to solve. Accurate per-boat distance measurement was not feasible at scale prior to modern GPS logging. Governance structures have favored administrative simplicity, comparability across years, and reduced protest risk over theoretical rigor.

The sailing community has also culturally accepted a degree of imprecision as intrinsic to the sport. What was once treated as unmeasurable noise is now a quantifiable variable. High-resolution GPS tracking, real-time wind modeling, and increasingly diverse design optimizations have made distance differentials both measurable and consequential.

As a result, the foundational assumption that all competitors effectively sail the same course is becoming less defensible with time. Handicap racing remains useful as an approximation, but it is not a true normalization of performance.

Its corrections are incomplete because they omit the most fundamental variable in sailing: each boat sails a different distance. This omission introduces structural bias that favors certain hull forms and strategies independent of sailing skill. Recognizing this limitation is not a criticism of the sport or its systems; it is an accurate technical assessment of their current boundaries.