How to record the reason for a disqualification

In many of the races you time you will have disqualified athletes. This can happen for different reasons: you may have detected it in one of your checks (for example, an athlete who is missing numerous timing points), or the organization or the judges may have told you.

This article explains how to record the reason for a disqualification in Copernico, with the participant's Article field and with a custom column that shows a different text for each status.

1. Change the status to Disqualified

The first step to disqualify a participant is to change their status to Disqualified. With this status, the participant will not be ranked: they will have no time and no position.

The step-by-step procedure is in Disqualifying participants. To learn more about athlete statuses, see Athlete status.

When you change an athlete's status to Disqualified, you will sometimes need to record the cause of that status. For this you can use two tools of the Participants screen: the Article field and a custom column.

2. Record the reason in the Article field

The Article field is a basic Copernico field that lets you record, for a participant, the cause of the change in their race status (for example, the rule article that justifies the disqualification).

It is in the participant's record. To fill it in:

1. On the Participants screen, select the participant.
2. Right-click and choose Edit selected. The athlete's record opens in the right-hand side panel.
3. Find the Article field and enter a text that records the cause of the disqualification.
4. Click Save.

You can then check the cause later or use this information in a document.

This field can be treated like any other participant field: you can include it in a preset to use it in a printed document.

3. Show a text for each status with a custom column

With a custom column you can create your own text for each race status. A custom column is a Copernico component that runs functions on the data. For more details on how to use them, see Custom columns.

In this case, follow these steps:

1. On the Participants screen, click the </> icon (Manage custom columns) in the right-hand sidebar.
2. Click Create new column (if you have no columns yet, the button is Create my first column) and enter the Column name.
3. Replace the content of the editor with this code, which creates a custom text based on the status:

function column( athlete, race, event, dataSet, util ) {
    const statusCodes = {
        "finished":"",
        "retired":"DNF",
        "quarantine":"QUA",
        "disqualified":"DQ",
        "notstarted":"DNS",
    }
    return statusCodes[athlete.status]
        ? statusCodes[athlete.status]
        : null
}

4. You can customize the text shown in the new column between the quotation marks. For example, in "disqualified":"DQ" you can replace DQ with any text; try “Did not complete the full course”.
5. Click Save. The column is ready to use.

When you save it, the column is enabled for the race you are working on. You can check it in the Manage custom columns panel, in the Columnas activadas para la carrera group (columns enabled for the race); from Mis columnas (my columns) you can also enable it in other races.

From then on, it appears in the list of available columns, and you can use it to create presets and include it in printed documents.