Chris writes:

"Quite a few were
disqualified at the Keskinada classic because weather had forced a
modification of the course and people got very confused. Last minute
changes can leave everybody confused."

From [short loop-really long loop], it got changed
to [short-medium-short-medium], to avoid a lot of clutter from
a big ice storm the day before. But they used good
sense, and did not DSQ a whole bunch of people who
made mistakes and skied it incorrectly, but actually did
the whole distance.

That includes the actual winner of the
race, Phil Shaw. It's clear from the intermediate times that
he ended up doing [short-short-medium-medium]. Independent
evidence is that he came ripping past a whole bunch of
us who had done a bit less than [short-medium] when he was already
almost finished [short-short-medium]. Probably he had earlier
got a gap during the first short loop (9km), and got waved
through by mistake instead of directed to turn right.
And he probably had a pretty bad time getting
past all us slowpokes.

If you look at those intermediate times, you can
see that he ended up integrated with the lead group
sometime after his [short-short-medium], and their
(correct) [short-medium-short], so a few people
probably got a bit of a surprise just then.

And in the end, he put a minute or two on the rest
for the win. I'll bet it would have been more than that
if he'd done the correct course. And it probably would
have been quite unjust to have DQed him, whatever
the actual rules are.

There are lots of other anomalous splits in those results.

Best, Peter