Hawera NZ’s Top Team in Worlds
England’s Royal Berkshire team won the title of Champion of the World Road Rescue Challenge. For New Zealand, the most notable performance came from Hawera. One of our greenest teams beat out some very experienced teams to place 8th overall in the World Road Rescue Challenges.
Feilding, on the other hand, placed high in the Australasian competition, but 18th in the Worlds, and Morrinsville experienced a similar swing.
This just goes to show that in the world of Road Rescue Challenges, it really is all about how a team performs on a given day, and in a given scenario. No matter how prepared or well practiced a team is, there is no way of knowing which scenario they are going to walk into.
So while Morrinsville and Feilding may have had some great runs in their Australasian scenarios, they didn’t perform so well in the Worlds. On the flip side of the coin, Hawera’s best runs came in World events.
While there are controls in place to ensure that assessing is as consistent as possible, there will always be an element of subjectivity and interpretations of the rules among assessors
Although many techniques are generally standard internationally, there are variations from country to country. And with this being the first year that the Worlds were governed by Australasian rules, many of the international assessors will have experienced learning curves with their scoring. As with any international event, language barriers sometimes come up as well.
There are a lot of factors that can determine how a team finishes, but all of these things are simply part of competing on the world stage. As Glenn Davies from Feilding put it: “Australasian Judges seem to want you to make big holes to get the patients out, and the World judges seem to want small holes. So sometimes you need to adjust your approach.”
But in the end, it’s not about interpretations of the rules, language barriers, placings, or even winning. Beyond all of those details, you’ll find a common thread among all the teams and assessors - a passion and appreciation for the learning that comes out of the Road Rescue Challenges.