ISAF Olympic Commision report - our thoughts

We focus on the competition, equipment and the world championship/Sailing World Cup/rankings confusion

Having pondered the ISAF Olympic Commission’s report we come away with several thoughts.

One of our main concerns is that in complying with the IOC’s demands, there is a strong possibility of compromising the competitive aspect of the Olympic sailing. Sailing is a wind-driven sport and the reason why Olympic medals are decided in a series of races rather than one single race is that it allows the best sailor to be determined on average, ideally over a range of conditions, while also removing the ‘chance’ element (a criticism that four years ago was being levelled at the medal race). Olympic sailors will no doubt argue that dramatically altering the race format – shortening course, reducing the number of races, etc – will turn the racing into too much of a lottery. Is it worth sailors training full time for four to six years if the Olympics are to be decided like this? So great care must be taken here.

With the choice equipment, the boats used in the Games, there is much more to it than merely what are nice boats or what has been used historically. The equipment is key to complying with the IOC’s criteria for how they rate sailing.

Ignoring completely the heritage of the classes, the equipment demands are being pulled in two directions – one satisfying the IOC’s demands for ‘universality’, cheap kit that is readily available in any far-flung corner of the globe, the other to showcase what a cool, exciting, TV audience-gripping sport sailing can be. Meanwhile the sailors themselves want either for there to be no change (stick with what you know, the boat you have trained in for x many years) or for more exciting, contemporary (and typically more expensive) boats.
Given the IOC’s demands then the best course of action would be to have Olympic sailing solely in the male and female Laser and RS:X classes with supplied gear throughout - four big classes with plenty of international representation, cheap equipment for sailors to train on and removing any technical advantage the bigger teams might be able to make.

Yes, this means there is no two person dinghy, no singlehander for the heavyweight blokes, no keelboat, no men’s skiff, no women’s match racing – but where do you draw the line? Are these any more valid than team racing, three or four person boats, multihulls, men’s match racing or any of the other numerous boats or flavours of our sport? Why not Farr 40s?

In addition to mass-participation sailing for as many nations as possible, the reach of the Olympics provides an unparalleled opportunity for sailing to attract new recruits. In our opinion one of the simplest ways to increase the television viewing figures, as well as making sailing a lot more attractive to today’s youth, as the Commission report recommends, is to add more high performance classes. It is not the fine intricacies of competition that will attract youth into the sport but the crash and burn and ‘wow’ factor. So there is a compelling argument for including boats such as the high performance skiff, the 49er, or better an equivalent that can be sailed by men and women alike. We would really like to see a strict one design Tornado in there and it would be unique across the Olympic sport if it was compulsory that the cat be sailed by a mixed crew. But in fact we would drop both of these in a favour of a one design foiling Moth, such as the Mach One.

As our media colleague Martin Tasker at TVNZ pointed out to us recently, the only sailing to stop his news-worn sport-mad TV colleagues in their tracks back at their headquarters in Auckland was when they came across some footage of foiling Moths racing. In terms of a state-of-the-art technology and the most visually exciting sailing, there are no dinghies that make more of a visual impact than the gravity-defying 11ft singlehanders and their inclusion in one stroke would fix many of the IOC criteria – from youth appeal to television viewing - to the extent that it would probably upstage all the other sailing ‘events’.

World championship chaos

In the past we have written about how the ISAF rankings are all very useful and convenient, but don’t actually reflect who is the best sailor in each class. Instead they reflect who are the best sailors who’ve turned up to regattas. Take the example of Ben Ainslie, who with Finn gold medals from the last two Olympiads on his mantelpiece you might expect to be somewhere near the top of the Finn ranking. In fact at present he is 90th, or the 7th best Skandia Team GBR Finn sailor, as he hasn’t competed at a Finn regatta since Qingdao.
The reality is that with the present system there is no way to reflect the fact that most professional Olympic sailors, particularly those who combine their time earning money in big boat sailing, tend to go slow to varying degrees for at least the first year or two of their four year Olympic campaigns. So the ISAF rankings as they are at present have a value and should stand, but should remain in the background and carry a more prominent caveat outlining their shortcomings.

For each Olympic class there are of course World and European Championships held annually, but then came the Sailing World Cup to confuse matters further.

The Sailing World Cup groups together some of the top Olympic classes regattas around the world – this year it comprises seven: Sail Melbourne, Rolex Miami OCR, Princess Sofia in Palma, Hyeres, the Delta Lloyd, Kieler Woche and Skandia Sail for Gold. The idea for it is essentially a good one: to create a Grand Prix circuit as a device to generate interest in Olympic sailing in the slow years – one to three - between the Games. The problem with this has been it hasn’t been a case of ‘out with the old, in with the new’ and was just been tacked on to what existed already – leading to considerable confusion. For at present each class annually still has its World and European Champions, plus it now has an additional World Sailing Cup champion and possibly a third sailor who heads his or her respective ISAF class ranking. Results from the Sailing World Cup events are obviously also included in the ISAF rankings so there is an additional conflict there.

In our opinion the main issue of confusion with the Sailing World Cup is it has the word ‘world’ in it, one which ISAF holds the right to use, but has possibly over applied in this case. But generally the problem with the World Cup is that despite the best efforts of ISAF, the tracking and television coverage at some events, it has yet to gain the razzmatazz that it set out to achieve. The acid test is that we have yet to hear an Olympic sailor who has told us that their mission is “to win the Sailing World Cup this year”. Maybe this will change with time, maybe it would change with prize money, certainly some more serious PR, giving some of the individual sailors more limelight, would help.

Conversely the ISAF Sailing World Championships (another ‘World’ in there you note), where World Championships for all the Olympic class are held in one place over one period, staged to date in Cadiz and Cascais with Perth coming up next year, have proved a great success. Why not hold this at the end of every year and also make it the annual Sailing World Cup finale too?

Frankly, but we may be speaking from nostalgia here, we like the current, simple-to-understand annual World and European championship system and that it is (and has been) the same format year in year out. Apples can be compared with apples. We think the optimum situation would be to have the ISAF World Sailing Games for the Olympic classes annually in years one to three of the Olympic Games, and these events would also become the final for each year’s Sailing World Cup. We don’t believe there are not enough venues around the world to cope with hosting a World Sailing Games every three out of four years.

In terms of increasing the international reach of the qualification process for the Games, the Commission has come up with sensible recommendations to hold Sailing World Cup events on all continents in the future, rather than the majority being in Europe as is the case at present.

Apart from the above we think the Commission’s recommendations are generally sensible and well founded. The wheels just need to be oiled within ISAF to make sure they are implemented promptly and without being watered down too much.

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