Five years ago, V. Danilov invited me to join the Association of Finn Racers, organized by V. Kravchenko. V. Danilov kindly gave me his own finn so I could see my own abilities and to train. One time, while on training, I turned over. Nobody was around to help me. I got finn back into position with no problem; the difficulties started when I tried to get on a boat myself. After the first unsuccessful try, I decided that the second try will be the last one. Having calmed myself with this thought, I gave myself a little rest and then managed to get the right leg on the boat; finally, I was in. After that I decided to accept the invitation. I was given a good yacht, and was surrounded with care and attention.

These events have taken me back to the past. I started sport sailing in 1947 in a well-known “Green haven” (a present location of a wonderful Moscow School Khlebnikovo (ЭШВСМ) ). In the early 60s in USSR a new system began to form aimed at preparing young sailors for the national team. Here I should mention Ivan Petrovich Lavrov, whose concept of “training in competition” played an important role. In 1967 I was accepted to the national team, and I, together with Valentin Mankin, began to travel abroad and participate in competitions around the globe. Team representatives, whose task was to keep us out of trouble, were with us at all times. They were very nice people. However, nobody knew any foreign languages and so we could not communicate with colleagues-sportsmen from other teams. That sometimes led to sad or ridiculous situations. Every time, coming back from the race, we quickly changed our clothes and left (that is to say, we were dragged from) the yacht club, without ever learning the results.

Four years ago I was going through my old papers and journals and found something interesting. When I opened the journal “FINNFARE” (Autumn 1965) and saw the results for the European Championship 1965 I began to doubt whether the count had been done right.

In those years points for a race were calculated by the formula

where N₀ – number of racers, N – place at a finish line. The one who got the most points cumulative for all races was the winner of the series. The points were awarded by thousands and to learn the results one had to wait for the judges to count all the points together and put the results on a board.

But I, a graduate in Physics from Moscow State University, to get the results used a simple method: if you multiply together the places for each race, then the leader would be the one, whose result of this multiplication would be the least. For a series of m races the formula for calculating the final score would be:

Usually, the sportsmen are interested in the difference of scores between the rivals. Let’s take a look at two racers M and D. The difference of the scores for a single race equals:

For a series of races we put together all those differences and get:

From this formula we can see, that the relation of multiplications of places taken is defined by the quotient of S_M and S_D: if the remainder is more than 1, then M racer has a greater score, if it is less than 1, - then D racer has more points and, thus, he is a winner.

At the European Championship in 1965, two men were rivaling for 1^st and 2^nd places, they were Soviet sailor Valentin Mankin and Bernd Dehmel from Germany. I have counted their scores again and this is what I got:

Mankin: multiplication of places 1152, final score 6317;

Dehmel: multiplication of places 2160, final score 6044.

In a protocol, on the other hand, Bernd Dehmel has 7044 points, 1000 points more!!! In other words, the real champion of Europe in 1965 was Valentin Mankin!

Valentin Mankin the third from the left. My Congratulations!

V. Kozlov
translation - G. Soloveychik
March 13, 2011

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