Watching the TVR event today this event did the traditional pre-pandemic pre-finals match 1 handshake of lining teams up, sending them through the line and shaking hands.
I haven’t seen an event do handshakes yet this year (though a couple FiM did elbow bumps…ow) and assuming it was not something we were doing since they were removed week 2 of 2020.
I went through the 2022 emcee training material and it seems that nothing prohibits hand shakes. Slides 17-19 detail this and mention handshake several times including point 6: “The teams then cross past the MC for the handshake/ Air High-five when the MC instructs them to shake hands.”
This must be a per venue/event decision or possibly a mistake.
Curious to know where everyone is at with handshakes. I must admit I have shaken plenty of people hands at events (though I fist bump a lot more now) and I do try to use hand sanitizer but it’s not perfect. Should handshakes be allowed at events and if you are in the position of going through the finals or judges line would you shake hands?
I was more focused on them actually doing the handshake before finals 1 - because historically, at least down here, they’ve done them before finals-2 which always felt weird.
That’s the way is used to be a really long time ago and events/emcees were supposed to change that like almost a decade ago. Weird that it was a recent change for them.
I have mixed feelings. Mostly because Covid is airborne and so fomite spread via handshakes shouldn’t actually be an issue, but also if people decide to adjust their masks or safety glasses or whatnot it could cause some issues. Also other diseases are more susceptible to fomite spread, and anything we can do to cut down on the robot flu may be helpful. Ultimately, don’t hate it if hand sanitizer is immediately available, but I’m mostly indifferent. There’s much bigger fish to fry as far as infectious disease imo, and any event which doesn’t require masks but doesn’t allow handshakes is doing a heavy amount of theater.
My thought is that currently, it feels too early. The fact that other protocols are still being enforced makes me think that there will be a non-zero number of participants who will feel unsafe and pressured into doing it. For them, the fact that it is optional may not occur to them nor will the fact that scientifically it is a generally low risk may not matter either.
Fear is not logical, and I do think for some people, the disconnect between what they expect and they encounter is enough to, at the very least, merit formally saying it is optional not mandatory or have the hand sanitizer station present.
The Kettering events did the Elbow Bumps, and at one point during K2, there was a huge Conga Line of students… Which was followed shortly thereafter with an announcement for them to all go wash their hands.
I am thinking more of the shake itself being optional. If a team member throws a fist bump or an air five instead of a handshake, I am relatively certain it will be reciprocated in kind. However, you bring up a good point. In certain sports, this is an important ceremony, and I seem to remember some instances where doing something different is considered ungracious.
I mean…kids have spent 2 years doing things differently if they feel like they should be more careful than others. I’m not going to hold it against anyone at this point who wants to return to a tiny semblance of their pre Covid lives.
My recollection is that current science on COVID is that nearly all transmission is airborne and that there have been few to no instances where we know of COVID being spread through contact. Early on, avoiding contact, using hand sanitizer and so on, made sense because we didn’t really know anything about how this thing spread. Now we do. [Happy to be corrected on this.]
Of course, there are other diseases that are spread by contact (flu and colds, for example). So, maybe no handshakes is still a good rule.
/s