p. Sebastian Marko
JASON MORIARTY
Jason (far right) with the other X-Fighters
judges in Mexico (2014)
With the Night of the Jumps, it’s an FIM sanctioned
series and recognised as an official world
championship. There are rulebooks and rules in
place, which makes altering/tweaking formats harder
than at X-Fighters. So for this series what we’ve tried
to do is build areas into the judging system, whereby
it’s rigid to a point but within each category there is
still an area for the judges on the day to adjust the
scores, e.g. if it’s a tight arena and the course has
next to no options, it’s just 2 landings, we will bring
down the overall weighting of the ‘track use’ score
as it makes no sense to have this contributing a large
proportion of the score if the riders can’t get creative.
When we have a big course with lots of different
lines, 4 packs etc. ‘track use’ scores will be weighted
higher overall. Originally the FIM were so strict about
changing rules we wouldn’t have been able to do
stuff like that. Nowadays we have a lot more flexibility
to adjust the scores to suit the conditions. If there’s
a bigger issue that has to be changed then we will
look into them all at the end of the season and make
the changes we need for the following season. We
actually have quite a few changes lined up for 2014
which are all really positive. We have been testing
them out, and as soon as they get the rubber stamp
from the FIM they will be written into the rules for
next season.
What’s the toughest call you’ve ever had to make
as a judge?
Recently there have been a lot of tough calls.
Especially at an event like X-Fighters where it’s headto-head and sometimes two riders will have won two
helmets each - it all hangs on the third helmet and
there’s almost nothing to separate it by. Then we’ve
got time pressure and TV pressure – I always like
to think we’ve made the right decision on the night,
but there have been some where you almost have
sleepless nights over it. You can definitely start to
over-analyse yourself and your decisions, and just
go round in circles thinking about close judging calls.
I think it’s one of those things where we’ve tried to
put a system in place where we know the riders have
confidence in what we do. We try to train the judges
as best we can so that on the night they can hold
up to the pressure and make those hard calls rather
than just going for the easy or popular decision.
Sometimes you have to go against the home guy, in
front of his home crowd, like we did at one of my first
X-fighters events. That was the year Spaniard local
Edgar Torronteras lost against Mad Mike Jones in
Madrid, and suddenly we literally had to take cover –
we were having bottles, cans and all sorts of shrapnel
thrown at us from the crowd. It’s already a very loud
arena with really steep seating and the crowd is
super close – so yeah, that was intense haha!
On the whole we try to be transparent and honest
with the riders about the scores and the systems and
let them know we always try to be as consistent as
possible. But once a decision has been made it has
been made – that’s what we as judges have to live
with and unfortunately for them sometimes, the riders
have to live with it too. u
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