Review complete on Bermuda Race snafu

Following the scoring errors that plagued the biennial Newport Bermuda Race in 2026, the Bermuda Race Organizing Committee (BROC) along with US Sailing has completed its review to eliminate issues in the future.

The race uses ORR ratings but then applies them to the Forecast Time Correction Factor (FCT-F) which determines the optimal finish times based on weather forecasts. The trouble began June 19 before the race start when BROC issued F-TCFs to the competing boats that were subsequently found to be in error.

The error was not raised until June 23 when a competitor flagged a questionable F-TCF discrepancy between two nearly identical boats. That report triggered an investigation that has found two distinct, independent problems:

• A human process failure on race morning. Additional weather and current files were downloaded from within the routing software for later comparison purposes. Unknown to the operator, two conflicting GRIBS files remained active alongside the official data sources during the optimization run, producing corrupted, effectively randomized elapsed-time calculations. This was the dominant cause of the Friday morning error.

• A separate software defect. The routing software produced different results when routing the fleet in a batch (“fleet mode”) versus routing boats individually. This defect was discovered early during the investigation (by June 25) and has since been identified and corrected by the software’s developer. While at the time this bug was discovered, it was the only known cause of F-TCF errors, it was later determined to be a very small contributor to the magnitude of erroneous F-TCF values.

Corrected, individually run F-TCFs were delivered to race officials on June 24, at which point the Race Committee corrected the results. Following several days of redress hearings, the International Jury directed publication of results on June 26, using the corrected F-TCFs. Those results have since been confirmed accurate and reproducible through multiple independent re-runs.

The investigation report documents the sequence of events relating to the erroneous F-TCFs, the root causes identified to date, an analysis isolating the relative impact of each cause, the steps taken to verify the corrected results, and the corrective actions BROC is adopting to prevent recurrence.

Additionally, the report in Section 8 identifies broader policy questions this incident has raised — about F-TCF’s fairness value relative to its complexity, and about the underlying ORR rating rule — which BROC intends to address through separate reviews.

For the complete report, click here.