Info:
Only half a year after the Swiss Long Distance Championships in Bettenhausen, the '98 edition of this event was held on March 7 in Tentlingen near Fribourg, the home of Markus & Julien Peissard, who organized the tournament. Upon arriving on saturday morning, we found it raining heavily and storming, with changing wind direction and strength. Nevertheless, it was decided to begin with a round of 4 throws each. There were 28 throwers present, from Switzerland, France, Germany and Belgium.

We already had experience with a laser rangefinder in Troyes. So we decided to use this device exclusively to measure the distances. The exact procedure looked like this: As usual, spotters took the bearing of the flying booms and set a small plug at the point of maximum distance. Then the measuring official placed a pole at the center of the throwing circle with the laser rangefinder placed on top of it and measured the distance to another official that was holding up a reflecting board (e.g. plasic) over the plug. The accuracy of the measurment is 1 m. The great advantage of this is that you know immediately how far your throw went out. For comparison, we measured the distance of the throws exceeding 100 m with a tape, at the end of the tournament.
There was a constant deviation of 2 m. The tape, made of plastic, not steel, was considered less precise since temperature and humidity affects the length of the tape (The laser rangefinder has an accuracy of 1 m). In Troyes, no significant deviations were observed. Therfore, we decided to use only the rangefinder in future LD tournaments in Switzerland, also if distances beyond 100 or 120 m are attained. This will safe considerable time, since no plugs will need to be placed and no measurments made after the tournament.

Back to the events in Tentlingen. Since it was raining and storming, it was difficult to achieve a valid return. Mostly, the booms got blown away or soared up high and then crashed. The use of very heavy booms was not the right solution because the field is located at an elevation of 800 m above sea level. The heavy booms simply crash upon return due to the lack of lift. In the end, Ingo Fratz (GER) had the farthest throw (118 m), followed by the frenchman Eugène Cinal. Only then came the Swiss Manuel Schütz, who therefore is the new long distance champion of Switzerland, Lorenz Gubler and Tibor Horvath, all with throws over 100 m. Once again, it was shown that real LD cracks are able to throw far even under the worst circumstances. It remains to be said that there were some really far throws which unfortunately failed to return correctly only by a few meters. Among them a throw by Tibor Horvath which he threw with too low tilt angle. Nevertheless, the boom stayed in the air, but hit a far away tree upon return (!). A brief measurment with the laser rangefinder showed that the tree stood 150 m away...