News Around the World
The Nacras are the best show in town for those famous Olympic ‘spectators’ but are we perhaps all now heading down a rabbit hole? The board classes are easiest to follow for a general audience while the eye-watering equipment budgets required to compete in the Nacra, 49er and 470 mock any vestige of accessibility as much as those six (even seven) figure budgets eased the Stars out of the Games and the FDs and Europes before them. World Sailing depends to an unhealthy extent upon IOC largesse to pay its wages yet IOC demands for TV-oriented sudden-death formats increasingly run counter to good competitive practice. On the other hand, for as long as records have been kept the results of the Olympic downhill skiing have been decided by a single run of less than two minutes
a recommended maximum number of opening-series races and a race target time for each event to optimise the amount of racing that can be conducted in front of the LA28 audiences within the wind window and session time available. ‘Men’s and Women’s Windsurfing and Men’s and Women’s Kite
will feature a maximum of 12 races in the opening series with an estimated time of no more than 12 minutes per race. Men’s and Women’s Skiff and the Mixed Multihull events will feature a maximum of nine races with an estimated 25 minutes per race, and the Men’s, Women’s and Mixed Dinghy events will feature eight races and are estimated to last between 30 and 35 minutes per race.’ Course options and grandstand finish zone recommendations
were also passed, aiming to preserve the tactical value of each race while creating a visually impactful conclusion for spectators and viewers. All recommendations were approved with 26 in favour, three against and four abstentions – a majority of some 80 per cent. Furthermore, it was confirmed that ‘Council also agreed with the
recommendation from the Events Committee that the Men’s and Women’s Kite, Mixed Dinghy and Mixed Multihull events will be reviewed ahead of Brisbane 2032. At the end of the review Council will decide whether to retain the event with the current equipment, retain the event with changes to the equipment or to remove the event and replace with another to be determined.’ Sailing on the ‘naughty step’ of the Olympic Games is nothing
new. The steady decline has been obvious, arguably since the end of London 2012, but the demand for a more televisual spectacle after the debacle in Marseille in 2024, and a benign event in Tokyo
24 SEAHORSE
2020, that was eventually held in 2021, has put the focus on sailing. Sports like baseball, softball, cricket, lacrosse and squash have
all caught the eye and met the requirements for Los Angeles 2028; there is no longer any doubt that a compelling televisual element with guaranteed action to a reliable timetable in designated slots is now the pre-requisite for Olympic inclusion. Sailing was already struggling with those criteria but the fiasco of Paris 2024 did a lot more damage. World Sailing is now in an unenviable position of needing to
change the sport it represents to keep its ultimate paymasters onside. A first proposal, to decide results on the basis of a single race, was quickly lining up the guns with a barrage of well-reasoned arguments against, led by Britain ILCA representative at Paris 2024, Micky Beckett. In a considered post Beckett threw the cat among the pigeons,
saying: ‘My concern lies with the total lack of consideration for what it is to be a competitor in this sport or someone who aspires to be just that. The wider sport is being overlooked, where the existing link between Olympic sailing and its grassroots is already far too thin. The current proposals, the type which we just raced with at the Sailing Grand Slam Final, will make Olympic sailing wholly unrecognisable to any grassroots participant; a dislocation which I don’t think the sport will recover from. ‘Realistically a large part of the rationale for this change is due
to the underwhelming spectacle of sailing at the Paris 2024 Olympics. This wasn’t due to a lack of effort on the part of the athletes, organisers or production team, it’s because there was
ROBERT DEAVES
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