scott.projectsomewhere

Now I’m not trying to have a go at all the great, incredibly talented Olympic sailors here. They’re good blokes, doing something they’re passionate about. Good on them. But anyway… here goes…

Commiserations to all those Tornado sailors and high-performance girls who have been jilted by the recent ISAF Olympic event selection.

They must feel pretty ripped off.

But it should represent a pretty good opportunity for the Ts to free themselves of the sheltered-workshop of Olympic class yachting. Just think, no need to go to Medemblik or Kiel. Why not try the Hobie route of major events in Tahiti, Fiji, Guadeloupe or even Garda? Sounds nice to me.

No need to pervert the class administration towards bullsh!t politics either.

Maybe local (or indeed National) fleets could be re-established, after the one-or-two Federation funded teams go back to regular jobs like everyone else and the playing field levels (somewhat). Perhaps there would be no need to join the exponentially increasing cost of the traveling circus that is the ‘circuit’ in order to be reasonably competitive.

Maybe.

Oh well, even with this absurd decision, Olympic sailing’s saving grace after the inevitable Qingdao debacle will be the passionate support of the English (since they only seem to win medals at sailing). After that, who would want to pay for the horrendously expensive and media-invisible event?

It makes me think… after another glamour week of racing on Sydney Harbour… that quote comes to mind “If a tree falls down in the woods and no one is around to hear it- does it make a sound?” and it’s butchered derivative… if Olympic sailing gets turfed but nobody sails the boats anyway, does anyone really care?

Maybe, with sailing out altogether, the National federations and their constituent clubs and classes could then focus on growing sailing participation at the grass-roots, rather than the current focus on the top %1.

Maybe all the awesome sailors currently living the dream would wake up and want to sail interesting, fast and challenging classes? Maybe.

With Olympic sailing voting itself into irrelevance… anything is possible…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Sailing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.