There is a lot riding on the 49er/Nacra 2025 worlds taking place at Cagliari if the rumours of problems with sailings appearance in future Olympic Games are true.
World Sailing, who control the structure of Olympic sailing, has struggled in recent years to find a selection of sailing craft that combines what sailors want to sail at the peak of their sailing career and what the International Olympic Committee (IOC) considers meets its commercial requirements.
The IOC have always moved to embrace new sport variants and the latest commercial media requirements, and as the ‘traditional’ television monopoly has waned, turned from fighting social media coverage to embracing it in every form. And not just as a delivery method but in requiring sports to adjust their rules to ensure their presentation has a better appeal to a short-term attention span, with simplistic outcomes favoured.
Sailing, which started back in the day as ‘Yachting’ with large keelboats, has also embraced new developments and transitioned through small keelboats and dinghies, to dinghy, multihull and board events, reflecting the ever changing makeup of of the sailing world. The IOC using subtle pressure to move World Sailing towards popular commercial trends that appeal to casual mass audience viewers.
Over recent Games this has resulted in the removal of keelboats and the blocking of moves towards offshore racing. While the introduction of Foiling and Kite driven boards, and the introduction of a restricted Medal Race to provide a one-race podium result, has moved Olympic sailing events ever further away from grassroots competitive sailing.
With the perceived threat of expulsion from the Games, World Sailing has reintroduced a series of Olympic class regattas and begun a series of test events to ‘improve’ the method of deciding who actually wins an event . . . The single, ten competitor, Medal Race apparently not considered clear or exciting enough.
World Sailing was heavily criticised for sailing being removed from the Paralympics, thus the knee-jerk reaction to any suggestion of further changes to sailing’s status in the Olympic family.
The buzzword is ‘jeopardy’ and maintaining the chance of winning or loosing until as late as possible.
The latest racing formats being trialed involve some form of final-day knock-out Medal Series. To achieve this also involves some tinkering with the scoring system. The aim being to prevent any competitor achieving a winning points position before the final day medal series.
With the wide split – both in the craft and the format used – between amateur club sailing and ‘professional’ Olympic sailing it might be asked why maintaining sailing in the Olympics is so important.
Well, World Sailing derives considerable income from the IOC, and that income eventually filters down to National Sailing Associations and hopefully to local clubs, so World Sailing and National Sailing Associations would need to cut their cloth to suit the much reduced income, something they cannot contemplate.
Overshadowing this scenario is the growth of SailGP, a professional racing circuit developed to provide competitive international sailing in a media friendly format. From a standing start five years ago it has built a world-wide circuit of 13 venues with international teams competing for a total prize pot of USD $12.8 million.
SailGP comes with plenty of jeopardy . . . The AC50 foiling multihulls are fast, providing spectacular interaction, and race within a limited arena, within easy viewing distance of the onsite audience and also allowing easy coverage by helicopter/drone cameras for the much bigger on-line audience.
The teams competing on the SailGP circuit comprise top sailors, most of whom have came through the Olympic classes and won Olympic medals. Perhaps SailGP could schedule an event in its programme for the 2028 LA Games to demonstrate another, very different face of sailing.
The SailGP sailors would no doubt jump at the chance to extend their Olympic life, just as the multimillionaire golfers and tennis players take a week off their lucrative world circuits to pick up an Olympic medal.
Could the traditional Olympic sailing classes survive such a direct comparison with the SailGP format, or would it act as a catalyst to bring sailing in all its forms to a wider audience?
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