Australian Women’s World Gliding Team
Our story
This site is the personal account of some of the members of the 2019 Australian Women’s World Gliding Team* who flew in the Lake Keepit event in January 2020. Here, we have documented the facts of the competition, the penalties we received, the subsequent appeal to FAI and attempted appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. We hope that in reading this, you will become informed with the facts.
The women pilots involved in this have never had an opportunity to speak to the gliding community and so we have chosen to do this in this way.
* Kerrie Claffey, Jo Davis, Jenny Ganderton,Ailsa McMillan,Lisa Trotter,Lisa Turner,Jenny Thompson.
The Story in a nutshell
As the last day of the WWGC at Lake Keepit dawned, the weather looked unpromising and the Australian team was sitting on the cusp of having an Australian world champion, only the fourth in over 60 years of participation at World events and our first ever womens’ world champion in Jo Davis in Club Class. To top this off, Lisa Trotter was in a podium position, sitting third place in Std Class, and overall, the team had produced the best ever result in World Championship events of any prior Australian team, male or female.
And then at 11am on that last contest day with gliders gridded and many pilots strapped in and wondering if the day would be called or cancelled, a bombshell struck!
The Championship organisers had accused the Australian team of “illicitly hacking” the organisation’s computer system and had imposed a 250 point penalty on all team pilots sufficient to remove Jo Davis and Lisa Trotter from any podium position and in Jo’s case to deny her a World Championship title.
What followed from there was a long and complex story of immense effort to overcome what many of the team saw as a grave injustice and which sadly ended over two years later with, in fact, a worse outcome due to a technicality beyond the control of the team.
The whole sorry saga has taken an immense toll on the individuals and was made worse by their inability to publicly comment whilst the appeals were in progress, all the while being trolled and pilloried by multiple people here and abroad.
This website serves to tell their story and we invite you to read on to understand the finer points of what actually happened.
No rule was broken, there was no cheating
A decision was made on the last day of the championship by the Competition Organisation to penalise all nine Australian pilots based on an untrue accusation that data had been gained illicitly. The pilots had in fact not broken any rules.
An appeal against the penalty was made by the Australian Team but the International Jury upheld the penalty even though no rule was broken. The Jury did not directly refer to any rule in its explanation for its decision.
The Australian Team pilots’ appeal to the FAI also resulted in a decision against them and the Decision statement incredibly made no reference to any rules whatsoever. The report did say the Australian Team breached a rule, but the rule was only partially quoted which concealed the fact that the rule was for the Organisation, not pilots.
The Organisation, the Jury and the FAI panel each tried to find a rule that would stick, each of their allegations being different. First was the suggestion by the Organisation that data was accessed illicitly, which was not true, second was the suggestion by the Jury that there was unauthorized interference with equipment, which was not true, and third was the suggestion by FAI that the pilots breached a rule that in fact applied to how the Organisation should display sailplane data. This was a clear attempt by all parties who all had a conflict of interest to find something to justify the penalty and outcome they wanted.
The Australian Team did not receive justice
Justice was not delivered to the Australian Team at any point. After an accusation was made on the last day of the competition, the Competition organisers gave a penalty without proper investigation of the claim of illicit access to data. They did not specify which rules were breached when giving the penalty. They also increased the penalty following a complaint which was based on the incorrect belief that the data was illicitly accessed. A similar lack of justice was meted out by the Jury and the FAI.
On the evening of last day of the competition, the International Jury made a decision against the Australian team without meeting as a group. The information they were given was not fully investigated and they did not speak with any members of the Australian team. They also did not specify a breach of any rules in their determination.
There was no unfair advantage
All the Teams at the competition could within the rules access tracking information that was equivalent to the information that the Australian Team had.
The use of tracking data in international competitions was commonplace despite not being commonly known about. All pilots at the competition had access to the main advantages of tracking data, which was at the start – public OGN – and within a thermal or two of the glider – powerFLARM. In general, the advantage of tracking data is hugely exaggerated compared to the advantage of pilot knowledge and skill simply looking out the window. The amount of use of the information given over the radio by team base is in fact very little.