Snail wrote:If there had been say 2-3 more competitors on the course, finishing roughly as expected with mid-course results, there might have been at least the 8 competitors within 100 points of their average. Then points would have been awarded, but probably still with a significant distortion at the front end (even if not quite as extreme as the figures above, given that the extra 2-3 would narrow the SD).
If there had been more finshers, surely after removing the outliers (some of whom may not truly be outliers had the calculation been done iteratively) you would be left with people who had a "reasonable" run, and the re-calculation of points would be more sensible - much like greywolf's calculation of what might have happened had one of the outliers mispunched?
Maybe someone who is deliberately "running down" in that way should be able to declare themselves non-competitive for ranking purposes?