Controversy Erupts at the WBC

Regular readers of this blog, listeners of the Portafilter.net Podcast and those who read That Board That Shall Not Be Named have a particular idea that I'm not one to mince words or shirk away from controversy.

I little bird called me yesterday with a report from Berne and the World Barista Championship. Seems that things are just: Situation Normal: All Fucked Up (SNAFU) at the WBC. Something about Sammy Piccolo not being judged correctly and some sort of controversy over the judges selection and how the Head Judge trained two of the finalists. Sounds like a problem to me. Even just the appearance of impropriety is enough to discredit the event.

It would be like myself making it into the Finals Round of the USBC and having John Sanders as my Head Judge. John and I are friends, he's my mentor, he's trained me, he's my roaster and while his feedback is extremely important to me and I have no questions about his ability to judge me in an objective manner, I wouldn't want him to be my Head Judge simply because no one else would believe it was legit. I would want my victory to be as questionless as possible.

Oh well, I guess I just think differently than most people.

And while I ranted just a week or so ago about the TARFU (Things Are Really Fucked Up) situation at the United States Barista Championship, am I as riled up about these WBC problems?

No, not really.

Maybe I've come to the point where I just don't care anymore. Maybe I accept the fact that the USBC/WBC will always be screwy. Maybe it's because I wasn't a competitor, nor did I spend thousands of dollars to compete (or send someone to compete) like I've done with the US competitions. Maybe it's because during the last podcast (#37) I vocalized the need for baristas to perform at the highest level in their own domain and that the competitions really mean nothing. That the ability to make a nice signature drink once is shit compared to being able to make that same level of complexity day-in and day-out for hundreds of customers a day.

For whatever reason, I really don't care anymore.