SailJuice Blog

Friday morning, and the Olympic Classes 2012 Survey is close to 800 responses. Thanks to all who have contributed so far, and for all the intelligent comment, as well as the more flippant responses too. “International Moths and gay discos” indeed! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you probably missed my latest newsletter, SailingTalk Xpress, which also includes an interview with reigning 49er World Champion Stevie Morrison. If you’d like to sign up for future editions, then head over to my newsletter sign-up page.

Looking through the comments, cost of equipment is a big discussion point, so I’ve been doing some ringing around to the people in the know. This is a very difficult topic to get to the bottom of, as anyone engaged in a serious Olympic campaign will know. Retail price of a boat, even as apparently simple as a Laser, by no means tells the whole story. I’ll bring you more on this thorny subject in the coming week.

Crew weight is another big issue, hardly surprisingly. Some argue the boats are all skewed to the skinny end of the spectrum, others say that the boats are too heavyweight oriented. Take one of today’s comments: “With the exception of the Finn there is no class available in the Olympics for a sailor who weighs over 80kg.” Er… excuse me! Did anyone else see a Star sail past their mind’s eye as they read that? How many sub-80kg Star crews – Star helms, come to that – can you think of in the top 10? I can even think of two 80kg-plus 49er crews who won medals in Athens 2004. Although I doubt they’ll be topping 80kg for Qingdao!

I don’t think Colin the Coach would have much truck with the above comment. “It doesn’t take much thought to discover that the present allocation of classes is strongly biased toward heavy people,” says Colin. “The imbalance has been partly because sailing has historically been a sport for bigger European people. This is rapidly changing as more and more Asian people, who are generally smaller, take up our sport. To some extent this imbalance has been because, in the past, some Class authorities have exerted extreme pressure at HKSF selection meetings – something which should be stopped as soon as possible.

“Now looks to be the time to sort it out fairly and properly. Why not carefully examine what the average weights are around the World, and look for classes – or weight ranges – which would give the fairest competition to sailors everywhere.

“The Olympics should not be a place for ‘unusual’ people – it should be a place for everyone to have a fair go.” Not that you see many ‘usual’, or ‘normal’ people in Basketball, Weightlifting or a good deal of other Olympic sports, though. But I do take your point Colin. Where a sport, such as sailing, has an opportunity to accommodate as many different body shapes and sizes as possible, then it should do its level best to achieve that. Do the current crop of classes really do such a bad job though? Let me know what you think.

Good to see the Survey is generating debate around some of the forums out there. Here are a couple where you can go and chew the fat over the many issues that are arising out of this complicated subject.

Sailing Anarchy Forum

Yachts and Yachting Forum