World Sailing . . . Back to the Future

Without a hint of irony World Sailing has announced that they will work with four of the leading Olympic class regattas on three key areas:

- Making it easier for sailors to compete across multiple events in the series
- Improved calendar coordination
- The promotion of Olympic class sailing

Shades of World Sailing’s Sailing World Cup – 2008 to 2018 . . .

That event attempted to provide a similar collaboration based around a series of established International regattas for the Olympic classes, including in fact the same four regattas mentioned in their latest press release.

It also involved the British ‘Sail for Gold Regatta’ held at WPNSA, Weymouth, until it was hived off to the EUROSAF Champions Sailing Cup, and faded away.

The last time an Olympic classes regatta was held in the UK was the 49er, 49erFX and Nacra 17 European Championships at Weymouth in 2019.

So here we go again.

It seems that World Sailing, with its new found sense of reality, has made-up with the big four European regattas – The Trofeo Princesa Sofia, Allianz Regatta, Semaine Olympique Française and Kieler Woche – and will try once again to build a coordinated series for the Olympic Classes.

Whether we will ever see the Weymouth Olympic classes regatta return to our Olympic centre is perhaps a dream too far.

As despite the considerable amounts of money expended on Olympic sailing in the UK, it fails to provide a single Olympic Regatta event.

After trotting out the same very obvious reasons for this latest attempt at collaboration across the sport, World Sailing and four of the leading Olympic class regattas have confirmed their competition dates for 2023 and 2024.

They have also announced a commitment for greater collaboration across the sport with the ambition of delivering benefits for event organisers on all continents, for national federations and for individual sailors.

2023 Regatta calendar: