Separate the Junior and Adult Competitions clearly
Comments about this discussion:
Started
While setting up the proposal for standardizing age groups across urban disciplines for Trials, I came across this overlapping topic:
Since the age group committee seems to lean towards clearly separating Junior and Adult competitions, should Trial follow this?
Background:
Right now, the best overall male and female riders make it to Final. This means that Junior and Adult riders can ride against each other. This is not the case in all other urban disciplines.
This means we would only have one male and one female podium for Trials, no Junior podiums
Is that what we want?
I would argue it would be good practice to separate Junior and Adult, meaning only the best Adult riders should make it to Finals, while the Junior riders Final Rankings will be taken from the prelims.
Using the prelim results should be sufficient, since only a couple of Junior riders have the ability to make it to Finals at the moment, and we do not need harder lines for most Junior riders to find the best ones.
Comment
to be honest, I'm not a fan of this. This means that if a junior is the best rider, there is no possibility to become European or World Champion.
I think that in Competition, the best rider should win. Not the older one.
And if you have the skills to make it to finals, then you're totally eligible to ride it. No matter if you're 12 or 21. Skills rule.
Comment
They would definitely be European or World Champion:
Junior European or World Champion.
This is how almost all other disciplines do it. There is an Adult Championship title and a Junior Championship title.
Only difference maybe: since Trials Finals take a lot of work and time to built and Junior riders usually don't need to one up the difficulty from Prelims, we just take the Final Ranking for the Junior Championship title from Prelim results.
In terms of standardizing age groups across Urban, this would also make sense. In Flatland and Street, we have Junior Championship titles and even if a 14yo rider could beat the best Adult rider, they will not of course be able to become Adult Champion.
But it is absolutely clear to them, that by the time they turn 15, they have their chance at it (and since they might have already be able to win against Adults at 14, their chance to then win the Adult title should be pretty high), but it gives clear expectation, when you are going to rider in Junior and when you are going to ride in Adult, across all urban disciplines.
Comment
I would say that there should definitely be a separation between Junior and Adult. I think the inconsistency about this (non) separation is one of the things that most riders (and outsiders) find strange in unicycling: Why is there a junior ranking/junior final in one discipline and not in the other? Why can a U15 participant become world champion in one discipline and junior world champion in another? I think it would be a big step to finally achieve standardization here - and in many disciplines there is already a separation of junior and adult.
In racing, for example, this separation has been consistently applied in Germany for over 15 years and it is completely normal for all athletes to win a junior title at U15. Once this is established, it is fully accepted by the athletes.
In addition, it should also be the task of the rules to protect children from too much performance pressure, for example. In my opinion, a consistent separation of junior and adult also makes an important contribution to this.