Page 6 - July/August Kwasind

André Colenbrander
Rear Commodore, Fleet andre.colenbrander@rbccm.com
By now, many of you may have been hearing rumblings about changes in Olympic sailing. We thought we should attempt to update our Membership as to what is going on, and how it might impact the Club.
What’s Happened?
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has been pressuring all Olympic sports to modernize based on the four criteria by which it judges sports:
1. Universality – the popularity and participation in the sport around the world
2. Gender Proportionality – the equality of gender representation
3. Sustainability – regarding economic, environmental and social issues: sport, technology & nature in harmony
4. Spectator Engagement – the level of interest in watching the sport through any means and the revenues generated
(a) Live
(b) Televised (c) Online
In this case, the relevant sailing body that the IOC has turned to is World Sailing (formerly the International Sailing Federation or “ISAF”). The World Sailing governance structure is very complex and not easy to describe in a few words but one can find the overall structure here:
http://www.sailing.org/tools/documents/ WSGovernanceStructure-\[23665\].pdf
The Constitution is here:
http://www.sailing.org/tools/documents/ CONSTITUTION2018-\[23295\].pdf
There is a Board, a Council, Committees of Council and Sub-Committees of Committees. The Events Committee was tasked with the job of making a submission to Council regarding the events for 2024. The existing events that were at Rio 2016 will be unchanged for Tokyo 2020 (save for a switch to foils in the Nacra and a reduction in the number of total sailors). As for 2024, this past February, World
Sailing decided to retain five events (Laser, Radial, 49er, 49er FX and Nacra 17) and open five events for potential changes (which could include new events and formats e.g. match racing, team racing, kites, team scoring, etc.).
This has all been complicated by the arrival of new equipment like foiling sailboats as well as an entirely new wind sport – kiteboarding. Rightly or wrongly, sailing now finds itself being evaluated based on criteria including audience appeal in a high tech, X-Games world. What happened in Olympic downhill skiing might be illustrative. Whereas we used to have just Slalom, Giant Slalom and Downhill we now have new downhill ski events including aerials, moguls, half- pipe, ski-cross not to mention all of the snowboard events. I believe this could be indicative of where the IOC is coming from as it looks at sailing.
Where Are We Now?
World Sailing (WS) tasked its Events Committee with reviewing proposals and coming up with a recommendation to take to the WS Council at its meeting in May. These proposals came from many sources ranging from class associations, national committees (like our own Sail Canada), industry groups (kiteboarding), etc. At the end of the day, there were over 60 proposals including six by the Events Committee itself. There were also others like club associations, former and current Olympic sailors, sailing organizations and other interested parties all weighing in through the whole gambit of communications outlets (email, social media, print, etc.). To say the opinions were diverse is an understatement. At the end of the day, the WS Council accepted the submission from the Romanian Sailing Federation. It maintains the five “retained” events, allows for new equipment for the Men and Women’s Windsurfing and then has three new events – a mixed double-handed dinghy (e.g. could be 470), a mixed kite and a mixed single-handed men and women’s dinghy (team scored events). The chart pn the following page summarizes the Olympic Sailing events at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the Romanian proposal currently being put forward by the World Sailing Council:
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JULY/AUGUST 2018 • KWASIND
RC MESSAGE