Well Tom, the good news about the tailslide in 2004 is that the ' 10 degrees cheating' will still be 'legal', right?
The rule change to eliminate it will only be effective in 2005 and after if I remember right.

Christophe told me in '98 that he'd much rather take a large downgrade by visibly tilting the plane in the right direction before the stall to force the flop direction when it goes down, since the flop will be the key judging criteria for most judges to give a zero. The 'visible slide backward' is extremely difficult to judge and you need big balls as a judge to give a zero on that criteria alone.

My approach when I wrote the 10 degrees cheating in the F&JG was to avoid penalizing the competitor who modifies the plane attitude to control the flop direction, and somewhat remove the 'chance' factor out of it as much as possible. Sounds like I was wrong since it will be removed .

BTW, how are you doing?

Ben P.