ORIGIN OF THE SCPF
This is my personal recollection of the origin of the SCPF. Corrections are welcome.
In the 1970’s, before USATF (then AAU) included the Road Running Technical Council, road course measurement was a one-man operation run by the late Ted Corbitt. He worked with Ken Young, the founder of road running records, who is still in the game. As they worked toward creating a credible road records system, the idea of “validation” emerged. That is, for a record to be recognized, the course must be checked, and it must not be found to be short. Around 1980 Ted decreed that, for certification to be valid, 1 m/km must be be added to the nominal course length. It has been that way ever since. Certification and records are Siamese twins, with the requirements of each dependent on the requirements of the other.
Let’s simplify what we have today, but without an SCPF:
Consider that today only two measurers exist, of more or less equally known abilities. Measurer A lays out a 10 km course at exactly 10,000 meters. A record is set. Measurer B is tasked to validate the course.
Because two measurements hardly ever agree, there is a 50 percent chance that Measurer B will find the course to be shorter than 10,000 meters.
What to do? Change the requirement to allow a record to be set on a course that validates to less than the nominal distance? This is a possibility, but one not popular with record-keepers, whose mantra has long been “A course shall not be short.”
The choice of adding on the SCPF was made to put things on the safe side. A competently laid out course, with SCPF included, will not fail its validation measurement.
There have been other proposed solutions to the problem, but the SCPF has survived.