Summer YDOIDOIT Pointscore

Previous Winners:

The YDOIDOIT Trophy.

Winner of the 2003/4 KJ Summer Pointscore YDOIDOIT Trophy, Stephen Brown being presented by 2002-03 winner, Steve Van Gils.

A Short History ...

The idea of a summer pointscore had long been in my mind from the early 90’s where I was inspired by the race organising of Barry Armstrong for the summer events. Some of these races only had 12 runners, no marshals, only the time keeper which was usually Barry Armstrong. By the mid 90’s we were now getting 30/40 runners in a race and only the odd marshal usually situated at the turnaround. There was definitely an opportunity there to introduce a pointscore system similar to the winter pointscore, the only problem was that all but 1 of the summer races are mass start and this would be a nightmare for pointscoring.

Enter the Computer programmer Alex Ross, who designed the programme so that we could run a mass start race and reverse the finishing times to handicap finishing order which would then allow points to be allocated in mass start races. This system is the same that is still now in place for the winter and summer series races and is also known as a silent handicap.

By January 1997 the time was right, all we needed was a name and a trophy. Dave Taylor had just completed his 1000 laps of 3.6km course at Warrawong and had invited Derek Moriarty, Neil Barnett, Andrew Godsman and myself as crewman in his attempt to break the Simpson Desert race record. I then pictured myself drinking a stubby of beer brought from the Birdsville Pub (where the race was to end) and filling it with Simpson Desert sand and mounting this on a piece of drift wood from the desert. This was the trophy. But it never eventuated, the sponsorship money for the event fell through. Alas.

A month later at a summer Stuart Park race, I had just completed the race when I noticed a runner in front of me with both hands on knees out of breath and muttering “why do I do it”, a question I’m sure that we have all asked ourselves somewhere on our running quests. The name “Whydoidoit” was given a “Y” for the WHY only to add to the oddness of it all. I then approached Bill Williamson who is a keen wood worker and gave him a design for the trophy, a simple round trophy double layered with a “?” in the middle. Bill in no time at all had whipped up the trophy ready for the Summer series of 1997/98.

The criteria for winning the trophy is to use your best 7 scoring races out of the 9 available pointscoring races. And the winner on receiving the trophy MUST reply to the Fox magazine on why they do it. On a finishing note the 2002/3 YDOIDOIT winner Steve VanGils said to me at the presentation that he was sure IDIOT was somewhere in the trophy name.