Will the 2008 sailing Olympiad be a success?

From the Olympic test event, the Daily Telegraph's sailing correspondent appraises Qingdao

“Got on board a westbound 747 - de de da dah dah - cos it never rains in Southern California…” The 1970s American saccharine pop was playing on the Air China flight from Qingdao to Beijing. Then the thought struck home.

In 12 days in China, not once was Chinese music heard in a public place. Sometimes it’s the trivial that strikes home when seeing a foreign place for the first time. This is certainly true of the host city to the Olympic sailing regatta. The 6 million strong city and China’s second largest port is an economic hot spot.

The streets are paved with Audis and VWs. On one junction you’ll find a Carrefour supermarket with Häagen-Daz, Gucci and Starbucks directly opposite. Even if Qingdao is meant to be one of China’s most westernised cities, thanks to Kaiser Wilhelm’s annexation of it back in 1897, the sense of the influence by outside cultures appears a recent, not distant, phenomenon.

So much for pre-conceptions. The same could be said about the sailing too. The sum of knowledge about sailing in Qingdao dates to the 2001 Optimist World Championship, a short time after the city was named as the 2008 host.

For those who don’t recall it - only one race was managed in the first three days. On other days two thirds of the fleet were failing to meet the time limit. Still buried in the Optimist class website are comments such as:

“We don’t have a crisis yet!” or “The Optimists are lucky enough to have Olympic race officer Michel Barbier here, but even he cannot invent wind.” Tellingly the class voted at its next AGM to try and select future venue for the Worlds with ‘guaranteed wind’.

And yet the 2008 test regatta was completed on schedule. Surprisingly all 11 of the new format medal races were completed on two courses on one day, the best day’s breeze of the regatta, the 49ers being the first to perform off the enormous typhoon- proof breakwater which served as a perfect grandstand.

We’ll come back to the sailing conditions because they are a complex. Let’s say this emphatically about the venue itself: it is the best in Olympic history and operated with the utmost courtesy and helpfulness.

ISAF vice president David Kellett is in the construction business back home in Australia so as one ISAF’s two Technical Delegates – you’ll get used to the International Olympic Committee job titles – his is an expert eye: “I remember in 1999 this was a dirty working shipyard with freighters on wharves and in dry docks and thousands of workers here. The buildings were decrepit. It looked as if there was a steel mill operating on the site. To see it today is just an amazing transformation.” (see page 2 for photos of this.)

Estimates put the Chinese expenditure here at US$ 410 million in the 45 hectare site. The launching ramps are big enough for commercial hovercraft. The Athletes Centre is all gleaming marble and down lighters. There’s a VIP observation tower big enough for air traffic control at a good sized airport. Even the manhole covers are castings showing the 2008 regatta logo.



The only structure of note still to be completed is the Athletes Village - three towers linked to the Athletes Centre by a short bridge. After the Games it will be an Inter-Continental hotel. Even here construction is largely finished; only the fit-out remains to be done

Excellent facilities of exemplary quality completed ahead of time – it’s an impressive achievement in a country where sailing has scarcely taken root. In a nation of 1.3 billion people it’s estimated that there are only 1,000 privately owned yachts.

The pace of change is remarkable. In 1996, Lee Lai Shan won the women’s windsurfing in Savannah for Hong Kong, then still a British dependency. In 2001 Lijia Hu won the girl’s Optimist Worlds and the Laser Radials Worlds in 2005, China’s first ever world champion in an Olympic class. In 2004 Yin Jian took silver in the women’s windsurfer at Athens and the bronze here at the test event in which Chinese sailors won a total of five medals, making them third nation behind Britain (eight) and France (five).

According to Li Huanhai, Deputy Director of the China National Sports Administration’s Water Sports Centre “ 200km at Dallian there is a very modern and fantastic marina, almost as good as Qingdao and in Xingdin and some of the other southern provinces, there are good marinas too.”

He explains the rush into watersports: “With the development of the economy people in China are getting more open minded. They are paying more attention to the quality of life. So outdoor sports are becoming more popular. People are enjoying them very much.”

Some six or seven of China’s 30 provinces now have sailing competitions and 2,000 registered sailors, most of the development occurring in coastal areas rather than inland.

None of which quite explains why the Olympic regatta is in Qingdao. Of the possible alternatives, the fast developing tropical resort island of Hainan was not considered.

Li Huanhai confirmed that the options besides Qingdao were Dalian to the north and Shenzhen and Qinhuangdao to the south. And those who hold ISAF responsible for site selection had better heed Dave Kellett’s words: “The Chinese presented us with several options but were quite direct in their approach that if Beijing was selected for the Olympics then Qingdao was their chosen city.”



Fait accompli?

And so to the sailing conditions. Over the past couple of years there have been mutterings that the weather data on which Qingdao got the nod should have come with a health warning.

The ISAF Vice President picks his words carefully about this. “It’s normal procedure to take the information supplied by bid cities on trust. The information that we had at the time of bid indicated that there was more wind than we have experienced in the last two years, but it could have been taken on some averages over a number of years.”

A perspective on this comes from Skandia Team GBR Olympic Manager Stephen Park, who knows the 2012 venue selection at Weymouth/Portland inside out. Park says the met data has to been supplied in a strict IOC prescribed pro-forma so the averages might not reflect the reality. The information gathering doesn’t allow scope for those with intimate knowledge to add qualifying knowledge such as “you might get three days of hardly any wind or a day when it could blow a solid 20-25 knots.”

That the regatta ended on a high could not have been predicted in the first week, when it was more of a testy regatta than test event. The daily team leaders meetings with venue manager Xu Han and ISAF officials got quite heated at times.

When one day’s forecast was given as “4-5 knots, gusting to 6” one coach muttered under his breath “Severe Gale Warning!” Another asked, more politely “Is today’s forecast optimistic?” The APP Broadcast team filming this meeting was given a tap on the shoulder half way through and asked to leave.

This meeting highlighted the contradictory aims of the regatta. For the Chinese hosts and ISAF it was a dress rehearsal. Its Grade 2 status said as much. For many sailors though it was far from a practice. Funding and ranking points were at stake and in the cast of the British team, cash bonuses for a medal.

Jerome Pels, the second ISAF Technical Delegate, admitted that Day 3 had “been quite a frustrating day from the sailors’ and organisers’ point of view.”

One thing the sailors didn’t like was some of the scheduling and pairings of classes on courses. The 49ers fell way behind schedule. The small Tornado fleet was started behind the 470s, and sometimes lost their window of wind thanks to a string of general recalls with the dinghies.

“They should maybe listen to the sailors a little more than worry about the schedule and spectacle,” said Austria’s double gold medallist Roman Hagara. The Austrian veteran also mentioned that the Tornado class might have to look at its ‘6 knot’ requirement to start a race in if sailors are to get more experience in super light conditions in coming two years. Ditto, the Finn which has a 12 knot average rule in its constitution for Gold Cup venue selection.

This was the key lesson learnt from Qingdao, that more flexibility will be needed in the programme. Often the wind picked up with the tide change. The sailors can wait for this, but will the TV schedule be flexible enough in two years’ time?

ISAF acknowledge that they will probably have to adapt the Olympic regatta to take Qingdao conditions into account. They had a team of 20 jury members and 20 race officers in Qingdao to assist in running the regatta and educate local teams. Council member Charlie Cook from the USA was the coordinator of the on-the-water management and told the team leaders: “There will be lots of discussion about courses and policies at the annual meetings in November.”

This did not assuage all team leaders. “They must not let standards slip too much,” said Ireland’s Olympic Director James O’Callaghan, who went up to the race committee when one Laser Radial saw the leader OCS at the start but not pulled off the course until it was abandoned after three legs during which time she neither had to tack upwind or gybe downwind.

“I think that practicing abandoning a race is as important as letting it run,” said O’Callaghan at the lively team leaders meeting. “It will instill confidence about the decision making in the sailors.”

US Sailing’s High Performance Director Gary Bodie was concerned that the nitty gritty of changes to the 2008 regatta would be discussed in committee rooms at Helsinki in three months after the problems were real and raw. “The right people are here now to come up with suggestions,” he says, clearly anxious about the idea, for instance, of introducing trapezoid courses for the Yngling class which habitually sails windward/leewards. “Reaching legs could open up a whole, new costly sail development programme,” cautioned Bodie.

This occurred on the back of three bad days. In the first week the gap between one isobar over Japan and another over middle China was 1,500 km. With high sea temperatures, there is little differentiation with the land temperature to get a sea breeze effect going during the day. In any case, most days were grey and murky.

In one race the Tornados took 20 minutes to cover the last 50 metres to their finish line. Other classes found it was taking eight times as long to sail upwind against the tide as the downwind leg time. Normally the ratio is somewhere in the 3:1 range.

The British probably have as much met data on Qingdao as anyone, even though some of their remote weather stations have been confiscated. “There is no denying that the average wind speed in Qingdao is light,” says British meteorologist Fiona Campbell. “The Chinese themselves quote an average of 4.8 m/s (9.3 knots) from June to September & only 4.5m/s (8.8 knots) in August & September. Strong winds of 10 - 15 knots or more are generally associated with either weather systems moving in from the west, or typhoons/tropical storms south east of Qingdao which are tracking northeast past Japan.
In reality you may see three to seven days per month of some welcome variation in wind speed above 10 knots.”

The light wind speeds only become a major problem because of the tide, which can run at over two knots in springs. It makes course setting ticklish, and though the breeze seems to shift in 30-40 degree movements, they are infrequent. “Fortunately most of the time the wind and tide are lined up,” says Kiwi Finn sailor Dan Slater, “so you can chose sides of the course.”

And guess what? It isn’t light all the time. Day 7 blew 18-19 knots for the first starts. It was great racing for the 49ers but when the less experienced teams started capsizing the race was abandoned. You could have heard Spain’s Iker Martinez and Xabi Fernandez sounding off to the race committee from 500m away. They were leading the race in a series that wasn’t happening for them. As it was, the 49ers still only sailed 10 of their scheduled 15 races before medal day.

Look at the results though, and it was the consistent sailors who came out on top. And memories can be short. The second week and some of the concluding races in Athens were light and limp. One of the courses in Sydney, located inside the harbour entrance with waves rebounding on all sides, was far from a worthy track for racing at Olympic level.

“Yes there are light winds, yes there is current, but that’s the test for the sailors,” says David Kellett. “You have to sail in areas like this sometimes. I’ve done enough Admiral’s Cups and Cowes Weeks to know what it’s like sailing in light winds and current! Even the Whitsundays, there’s current and if the trades aren’t blowing Hamilton Island Race Week can be see drifting racing. You just cop that.”

Given a reasonable run of breeze and an adaptable race schedule, what happens out on the water could make for a great Olympic regatta. Everything else about the Qingdao venue is already exceptional.