Human error contributed to the controversial conclusion to the Newport Bermuda Race this year, when competitors were forced to wait a number of days for results to be confirmed.

The Bermuda Race Organising Committee and US Sailing have released a joint report after conducting an investigation into the scoring error, which caused a delay of almost four days before the results were ratified.

In a statement released on Tuesday evening, the BROC reported that the investigation had found two independent problems contributed to the wrong results initially being announced.

The first was attributed to a human processing failure on Friday morning.

“Additional weather and current files were downloaded from within the routing software for later comparison purposes,” the report said.

“Unknown to the operator, two conflicting GRIBS [General Regularly distributed Information in Binary form] files remained active alongside the official data sources during the optimisation run, producing corrupted, effectively randomised elapsed-time calculations. This was the dominant cause of the Friday morning error.”

A separate software defect was also uncovered during the course of the investigation.

“The routing software produced different results when routing the fleet in a batch (“fleet mode”) versus routing boats individually,” the report read.

“This defect was discovered early during the investigation [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 [Forecast‑Time Correction Factor] 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 Wednesday, 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 full 14-page 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.

The incident also identifies broader policy questions about F-TCF's fairness value relative to its complexity and about the underlying ORR [Offshore Rating Rule], which will be addressed through separate reviews.