'Urgent' Battle between RYA & ISAF
Andy Rice | February 27, 2008Good news, but also a lot of bad news, for sailors who want to see a re-vote of the slate of 10 sailing Events being lined up for the Olympic Regatta in Weymouth 2012.
If you’ve been following this blog since last October, you’ll be familiar with the whole Estoril saga, where the Men’s Keelboat won a narrow victory over the Multihull, and the Women’s Match Racing just edged out the Women’s Skiff. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, dig back through the SailJuice archives for October and November 2007.)
SailJuice was not a fan of either of these outcomes, and reported on the eleventh-hour change in voting procedure, a cunning move that was led by Charley Cook from US Sailing, whose agenda was to see the keelboats remain in the Games. (Fair play to you, by the way, Charley. I don’t agree with what you did, but you were there to do a job for your country.)
The Royal Yachting Association has since led a campaign to get the voting re-opened, and made a submission to ISAF to have a revote take place at the mid-year meeting. Last week the ISAF Executive Committee sat down in Switzerland to discuss what ‘urgent’ matters should be discussed at the mid-year meeting which takes place in Qingdao this May.
Most of the urgent matters were over relatively trivial issues, but the one that engaged them a bit more was the RYA’s submission. The Exec referred the matter to ISAF Constitution Committee (chaired by David Lees and vice-chaired by a certain Charley Cook) to get a definition of ‘urgent’. The Constitution Committee debated, did not come to a unanimous conclusion, but ultimately deemed the RYA’s submission as non-urgent.
When SailJuice spoke to Rod Carr at the end of last week – before he had had a chance to speak to ISAF – he was perplexed, to put it mildly. “We’re non-plussed by the decision not to consider these matters urgent. By November we believe it will be too late to change, so how could you consider it not urgent? I’m not a lawyer, this is just common sense.”
The reason for Rod being non-plussed was that he was under the impression that the International Olympic Committee was expecting ISAF to send in the final list of 2012 Event for IOC approval and rubber-stamping within the next few weeks. So for ISAF to pronounce this issue as non-urgent and shoving the submission back to November would mean the 10 Events were already set in stone. It was a two-fingered salute by ISAF to the RYA, and anyone else who felt short-changed by the voting in Estoril.
So you can understand why Rod was a little vexed by this state of affairs.
Things improved the following week however, when Rod had a chance to speak to Jerome Pels, the newly installed ISAF Secretary General. Apparently there is still room and time for discussion after all, as Rod explained: “Everyone was assuming that both the details of Events and Equipment had to be submitted to the IOC by this year. ISAF has clarified this with the IOC and apparently this is not the case.”
So, it is still possible for the Events slate to be debated and even revoted at this November’s AGM.
A sigh of relief from Rod Carr then? Er, no, not really. “We think it [the vote last November] is a bad decision and that the proposal to reconsider these matters should still be considered urgent.”
Rod’s concern is that by the next AGM, any momentum for turning over the Estoril decision will be long gone. “By this November, many people will have kicked this issue into the long grass. They will have got over their shock and anger that they had when the decision was first announced, and increasingly people will say, ‘Oh well, never mind, let’s get on with what we’ve got.’”
To give you an example of what will happen before then, Rod believes that the RYA will have been forced to close down any funding for its younger sailors on the Olympic Development Programme. “We can’t justify paying out money for sailors on the off-chance that we might get a change of Olympic Events,” says Rod.
The RYA has stuck its neck out on this issue, but not before doing a lot of consulting with other national sailing authorities behind the scenes, to gauge the mood. Sufficiently buoyed by the offers of support, the RYA fired off its salvo against this decision at the end of last year. Yachting Australia has been another vocal opponent to the Estoril decision, and to a lesser extent the French federation, the FFV (although they seem to want to keep the multihull AND the keelboat, without seeming to offer much solution to the 11-into-10-doesn’t-go problem).
But Rod is wondering where the rest of the rebel uprising has gone. “We’ve done our bit, where are the rest? They’re saying things in private, and being very supportive behind the scenes. But talk is cheap. We’ve had our say, the Australians, the French and a few others have had their say about things. Now, if other people want something to change, then they need to speak out and make their case to ISAF.”
With November, rather than May, now being the last opportunity to debate the Olympic slate, ISAF is open to submissions until 1 August. But Rod says that is too late. He wants to see other nations nail their colours to the mast now.
“We’ve got a stretching target to get two-thirds – that’s 26 people – of the delegates to vote, to change last November’s decisions. The Austrians, Danes, UK, Australia, France, New Zealand are all on the record as wanting a vote.” Now it’s time for others to step up, he says.
Rod wants some of the smaller nations to follow their lead. “Let’s say you were one of the smaller nations, and you’re thinking, ‘do I need to put in a submission?’. You’re worried about the slate as it stands, so you say to yourself, ‘One of the big nations will put in a submission, and I’ll vote for that.’”
That won’t be good enough, says Rod. “You could say the Executive are well within their rights to leave things as they are. If only four or five nations put in a submission, it’s easy for them to tell themselves that ISAF represents more than a hundred nations, so there’s no big furore here.”
Indeed, when I spoke to Jerome Pels about this issue a couple of days ago, he made that very point, that from the ISAF perspective they see a lot of complaint at grass roots level but not much complaint from national authorities other than the RYA and Yachting Australia.
There is more to this, and I’ll come back to you with more detail from my conversation with Jerome in the next few days, but that should be enough for you to chew on for the time being.
A few months have passed since we discussed this issue. But it seems like a good time to reassess things again, particularly as the Tornado Worlds are going on in New Zealand right now.
What’s your view? Do you think the RYA should quit yapping and let bygones be bygones? Or should Rod and his band of rebels continue to battle all the way through to this November?
Its very difficult… On the one hand my heart says its time for the Finn to go, and the Tornado to stay in, but how do you justify throwing out a boat that’s sailed in about twice as many countries as the Tornado and about three times as many as the F18 when sailing is being criticised for having insufficient global spread… And the numbers are much the same for the Star, plus the problem of logistics for the Paralympics. IOC, we badly need that medal back…
We’ve already started up a program nationally for young talented sailors to Match-race in a Keel boat.
I suppose training such a skill is not completely wasted, even going back to fleet racing, but where to put the money is…..
Well, I’m proud to be both British and Australian! Lots of grass-roots sailors bag out their national authorities as being unrepresentative, but at least UK and Aus are listening and passing the message on.
On a related note, I seriously don’t see the need for lightweight and heavyweight versions of the same basic event. If you want to compete at the Olympics, pick a boat that’s suitable for your body (or change your weight, as the top guys do). If you want to sail for fun, pick a boat you can have fun in.
For the moment I’ll stick to crewing a 49er and acknowledging I’m too heavy (and not fit enough) at 43 to be the ‘perfect fit’. Doesn’t stop me having a ball.
I think that we should keep fighting. Personally I really want a high performance, and the Danish federation tries everything to get a high performance.
My opinion is still that it is unfair that some “old guys” have to make the decision about my future.
So keep fighting GBR.!
We really need a re-vote!
I have no strong emotions regarding the tornado, and i support the finn (despite being probably the smallest man alive), but not getting a womans high performance dinghy was a tragedy.
There are going to be alot of talented young women coming out of the 29er asking ‘what do i do now?’.
Because of the way the circuit works they can hardly throw a match racing team together and sail every weekend.
I almost forgot. get a re-VOTE. Good on the RYA too for pushing this.
What is so good about the RYA, they had 3 votes and two went against the Tornado if memory serves me right. The next olympics for which the boats are being picked for are in the UK and they had no strategy going into the voting and now they scramble. But what do they want, they seem to be huffïng and puffing being embarrassed about what they did, but what is there strategy (to develop the sport) now?
And Australia is only protecting their strength in the Tornado class. The home of skiff sailing is protecting the 420/470 and other dinosaurs but again they failed to present a clear strategy before the vote which had been scheduled for years.
These two “great” sailing nations fail to gather support from the small nations around the world, and Rod wonder why?
it is down to the sailors to stand up and shout at there national authoritys who in turn might shout at isaf, but dont hold your breath the face book groups on this subject have less than 2000 members and surely a fair few of these are duplicated.
So get shouting this group has the most members;
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5736758925
JH, the UK did NOT have three votes.
The UK, per se, had one vote. There were two other Britishers who had a vote but that was NOT in their capacity as UK representative. One, for example, is the offshore rep. 99% of offshore sailors sail leadmines. How would you feel as a yacht sailor if the rep for the closest discipline to yours voted for it to get dumped? Remember, leadmining is the most popular form of sailboat racing (with up to 10,000 competitors PER RACE it dwarfs anything dinghies, cats or boards can produce) and therefore it’s hard to vote against their spot in the Games – unless you want to trade the dim hope of possibly getting more value from more TV against things like fairness and treating sailors from all disciplines equally.
If the 420 and 470 are such dinosaurs and skiffing is the way of the future, then why are the skiff classes in Oz and the UK not growing strongly, if at all? Why are they so small in most countries? Why have the big dinghy manufacturers moved away from skiff types and back to more conventional boats?
Sure, the Finn should go to allow the cat back in, but in lots of ways it’s a bugger that we have to dump the much more popular class.
It was interesting that when the Tornado was (wrongly) dumped, there was a huge amount of talk on the net about how the cat sailors had to create a new structure for junior sailing. That all seems to have died away now. Pity.
Maybe it’s not surprising that the small countries are not supporting the vote. Very few of them have Tornado fleets. Many more have Finn fleets and probably lots of them could arrange for women to match race leadmines more easily than they can get a Tornado programme going.
Maybe what we really need is a new and cheaper OD Olympic cat. It won’t be as wonderful as the Tornado but if it’s more popular, Olympic sailing could benefit.
Chris, You are of course right, but my beef is that the RYA and “your” federation had no clear strategy before the vote and I would say no clear strategy now either except for that they became unhappy (when people started complaining). Add to this that the ISAF executive has no clear opinion and cohesive strategy on where to take the sport.
These decisions are taken by voting seperately on bits and pieces and no one (except for the events committee) presents a overall strategy on what they wish to achieve.
A complete lack of leadership.
[...] as non-urgent. The letter mentions the importance of the 15th March deadline, although as Rod Carr pointed out in SailJuice a couple of days ago, it does appear there is more time for ‘ISAF rebels’ to make their case [...]
Good points JH.
One thing that really worries me about the lack of leadership is that many of those in authority don’t seem to even have a clear picture of what people are actually sailing. They’re trying to run a sport when they don’t even know its shape, size or course. Instead they seem to just assume it’s going towards whatever is currently getting publicity.
[...] – The Sequel Some of the people mentioned in my ‘Urgent’ story last week have responded to some points and put right some inaccuracies there. My apologies for that, as I [...]
[...] clause boosts the Rebel Cause Last week’s ISAF Word of the Week was URGENT. Didn’t we have fun with that one! This week’s ISAF Word of the Week is CLOSING. Early signs [...]