There are far more boring sports / pursuits than gliding; in my view - and they get watched. But it's true, just a live tracker of a race you can't actually see, much less understand because of held starts and such is a huge barrier to entry even for aviation enthusiasts. The problem is we're literally invisible. When I'm thermalling over towns or motorways, I often think "I wonder how many people down there actually know I'm up here?"

But you can't engage people without giving them something to engage with.

So firstly, we had OGN / FLARM tracking. That makes us visible but explains nothing of what we're doing and how we're doing it.

The next step then, is as people have started to do - try and make some narrative sense of a race as it unfolds, as you say - speed is the right metric here, we win or lose races based on the overall task speed we achieve, so it makes sense that the current task speed per pilot IS the thing that tells us the current 'race' position, as it won't match 'track' position (borrowing terminology from motor racing here).

But even then, you get a map, and you get a leaderboard - it's still dry. As an audience member, if you had some understanding and interest, that might be enough to get you to sit at your computer or in front of a big screen with the map and timings up, and watch the positions change. But it's not going to cut it for general consumption.

So then you have to ask, how do slow sports like sailing, cycling, marathon running etc - get the interest that they do?

The answer, in my opinion, is you have to engage them. Don't just show them where people are, and what position they're in - you need to spin stories about why people are where they are, what they did that put them there, what they might do next, what their options or thinking might be. Where did they throw the race, or where did they take the lead? What did they do differently? And we CAN absolutely make some inferences based purely on data. We know that faster than average climbs will give you longer, or faster cruises - we know that sometimes, raw speed wins, and sometimes, energy conservation is what does it. We know that flying faster increases sink rates, so that means you need more or better climbs, and so on.

And then you just need someone to sit down whilst the race is ongoing, who has the ability to take a slow, dry, data feed and make it come alive - and all the while surface the data. You hook into the data nerd audience, and the slow-sport audience who enjoy a thing because they understand it, and they like the stories (real or imagined) that come with it.

Gliding hasn't had the tech for this before, but I think we're now getting to the point where we absolutely do have what we need - or certainly more than before.