2016 Olympics: Sailors of the World - Hang your heads and weep! (Sail-World)

No, they're not. In nearly all Olympic events, technological innovations must be used in major events (e.g. World championships etc) before they are accepted into the Olympics. Some rich countries might be able to afford boron-fibre/ titanium boats, but don't expect the Olympics to allow them

 

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But many technological innovations are accepted. And in sailing the idea of using outdated technology that is not physically demanding to sail is just wrong. You can get a new custom all carbon Moth for around $18,000 and a Star-about $40-60000. High tech boats aren't necessarily the most costly but the boats that represent newest performance designs possible should be Olympic Class boats, in my opinion.
And Olympic Class sailors should be the most physically fit sailors the sport produces. The Olympics for sailing should present the highest performance boats sailed by exceptional athletes-anything less is a travesty.

 

Doug:

Your elitist opinions are fine, but they miss the Olympic mark by a couple kilometers. The Olympics have always been about boats that have strong international presence and penetration into countries with less money than the top 5%. Witness 470s, Finns, Yngling, Stars etc. None of these boats are state of the art for 40 years ago, let alone today. The Olympic tradition is to provide a playing field shared by all countries - not just the fortunate few who can afford the leading edge stuff.

And yes, the Olympic Games are a travesty, and have been for quite some time. Don't expect this to change any time soon - it ever. The Olympics were never about leading edge anything, and aren't about the best competition - that is what World Championships are for, and why people can select their preferred boat class regardless of what the corrupt Olympic organizers designate as "Olympic Class" boats. It appears you bought into the Olympic hype generated by the TV crowd to keep the people watching commercials between the broadcast Games. Just because ESPN says the Olympics are the pinnacle of sports doesn't mean they are.

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CutOnce

 

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Are these personal attacks or ad hominem attacks? Or is the answer yes?

 

By the way, CT249, I didn't recommend dumping basic, older, sailing craft designs, because there has to be a number of HIGH PERFORMANCE, and that's the important difference, affordable designs competing for equal opportunities - otherwise why would a highly trained athlete bother to even enter: we're talking about finding the best of the best ... plus you would also have top of the performance bracket designs like 49er, Moth, multihull as well, a dozen different class designs all together.

 

Any statement that Starboat sailors or Finn sailors are not athletes is idiotic. It is disrespectful and ill informed. Go to any Star or Finn event and you will not be seeing any "beer bellies".

 

Wrong again. People like to sail all manner of boats - from re-constructions of ancient Egyptian vessels to high-tech platforms with little resemblance to yachts.

 

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No, not at all. I was referring to sailing in the Olympics-sorry I didn't make that clearer.

My full quote:

 

Yes. Technological innovations are sometimes accepted after thorough testing and acceptance in other competitions.

But what is considered "advanced" today is out of date in a couple of years. Some high-tech boats that you personally might like to see in the Olympics will be less than the best available by the time the events are actually held.

Personally, I'd like to see an Olympic event in which the athlete hauls a log out of a forest, shapes it with an axe, and then paddles it over a 10 km course. That has as much chance of being implemented as your suggestion of using the "best available technology" at each Olympics.

 

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You're probably right-but it's unfortunate.....

 

As Leo has said, there are also many technological innovations that are NOT accepted at the Olympics. Some of them were already listed, such as the streamlined suits for swimming, swim fins, the rules on bicycles and archery, etc.

Look at the Olympic shooting events - technologically you'd just blast the target to pieces with a guided missile or a heavy machine gun. In reality they use a little .22 without laser sights or an air pistol.

The runners are NOT allowed to use Cheetah Flex Feet like the ones worn by Oscar Pistorius (http://www.ossur.com/?PageID=13462) because "any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device" is banned.

The Olympic rowing, canoe and kayak events are heavily restricted.

The actual fact is that the Olympic sailing classes are probably as close, or closer to, ultimate technology than other sports. And the cost implications of opening up the rules more are horrendous. The Brits spent vast sums developing ONE mast for the Europe dinghy in 2000. The tank-testing for the stern (just the stern!) of the 18 Foot Skiff Bradmill in the '80s cost about as much as a new J/24 did. If you want open technology across most types of classes, then you are going to have to find hundreds of thousands of dollars - probably millions per major country per Olympiad - to fund the tank testing, the materials scientists, the high-tech layups etc.

How are you then going to explain to the public and less developed countries why it's fine to throw such huge sums of money into one fairly small sport? How do you justify it when the high performance classes are not as popular as slower boats, and therefore they can't even be justified because they get people off the couch and into a healthy lifestyle?

Of course you are entitled to your opinion, but we are also entitled to think that to say "restricting technology is just wrong" is not making a particularly strong case when just about every single event at the Games has such restrictions. Without technological restrictions, sports become far too dependent on engineers and designers and far too expensive.

Surely it's no accident that the world's most popular sport has restrictions so tough that often no-one scores a single goal, and you can't even use your hands unless you're a goalie or Maradona. Getting around the restrictions is one of the basic attractions of any sport, just like getting around a course is the basics of many sports. Either you have restrictions, or Usain Bolt is replaced by someone strapped to a rocket sled for the 100m sprint.....

The Moth itself is a creation of restrictions - not just the dimensional restrictions, but the fact that Moth racing is normally restricted to courses rather than just blasting on a high-wind reach on a kiteboard.

As Paul has mentioned, if you think that hiking an Olympic keelboat, 470 or Laser is not physically demanding then it would be interesting to see you try it! For someone to imply that the Olympic keelboat, Laser and 470 sailors are not exceptionally athletic is bizarre..... do you actually know any of them and the training they do?

If you object to people being rude to you, why do you think it's fine for you to slag off the fitness, dedication and athletism of so many of the best sailors?

 

I completely agree that there should be some high performance craft. But if you are implying that a highly trained athlete would only bother to enter if there were fast boats, or that you don't find the best of the best in slow boats, then you're being extremely unfair to absolutely brilliant sailors who sail, and often prefer, slower craft.

 

Yeah, I've supported ISAF from some attacks but their decision making appears poor a lot of the time. I'm concerned by the very brief submissions that they often get - if a class as savvy as the Finn relies on such short submissions as they do, it seems to indicate that the delegates are looking at the sport in a very simplistic manner. And their communication skills are certainly wanting - for instance while I think dumping the cat was a bad idea, from some angles it was understandable. The problem was that ISAF didn't even try to explain its reasoning.

Gotta agree with a lot of your post 18!

BTW, I wasn't dissing Villeneuve - the book and many other records of that great F1 season say that it was Damon Hill who was 3rd best driver at best, behind Schumacher (the established genius) and Villeneuve (the new genius).

The fact that Damon won (and I was glad to see it, as I was a fan of his previous year's performance and of him as a person) despite not being considered the best driver seemed to me to illustrate the issues when technology has such a great impact on winning.

Considering the vast size and wealth of the auto industry, the number of active racers appears to be surprisingly low, which seems to me to show that there are problems with the auto racing approach of worshipping a certain level of technology. Given the car's place in our world, auto racing should be one of the most popular participant sports going, but it's a long way off that.

 

My suggestions, CT249, was that since the committee seems to be disappearing the exciting designs from Olympic competition, then they're either very foolish, or they're doing it on purpose and want sailing to disappear as well. I was putting forward a new direction, new name, and a mixture of classes, lower and upper designs in performance and expense. Of course this will never happen. Just a dream. But then again ....?
IMO, if sailing interest is waning, then the revolution that is happening in the Americas Cup is going to inject new life and m0omentum into the sport ... and perhaps a similar approach could be made to "Olympic" - read new name, sailing.
And I've never mentioned, Paul B, or implied anything derogatory about the extreme skill, cunning and fitness of top sailors in old designs ... but old school is not going to attract new school. Wrong??

 

Gary, for a start there is little evidence that ISAF is trying to get rid of exciting designs from the Olympics, per se - the dumping of the keelboats to bring in another skiff and a cat is evidence of that, surely.

Of course everyone is entitled to their opinions, but shouldn't criticisms of others be based on some sort of factual basis?

Some of us feel that, having studied a lot of evidence, there is no factual basis for a belief that concentrating on promoting the high-performance end of the sport actually leads to an increase in participation. For example, in the mid '70s the cat boom in Australia saw hundreds of of cats racing. Surely if having so many fast boats was attractive to newcomers, that scene would have kept growing. Instead, it has collapsed so badly that races that once attracted around 300 cats now get around a dozen.

Similarly,windsurfing promoted the high-performance end of the sport and within 2 years of the premier contest switching to high performance, the number of boards sold started to collapse.

If promoting mainly the high performance end worked, then why did windsurfing collapse when it promoted high performance? Why did the cat scene collapse? If promoting mainly high performance works then why have skiffs retreated in Australia (apart from a few NSW clubs where they are heavily subsidised) despite decades of promotion?

If promoting mainly high performance works (in terms of attracting sailors) then why do more people chose slow leadmines? If high performance works then why are there more Sunbursts than Rs? Why are there more Zephyrs than 3.7? Why are 18 Foot Skiffs and Rs so rare? Why have the 18 fleets from Charteris Bay, the Waimakiriri, Perth, Melbourne and other places died out? Where are the big fleets of B and C Class cats? Where are the Formula Windsurfer fleets, the ORMA 60s in numbers akin to that of IRC 60s, the big fleets of maxi multis?

This discussion is similar to the one where people claim that hosting the Olympics or promoting high-performance sports will increase the number of people taking part in sport. That is completely wrong, and many studies have shown that promoting high performance or major events does NOTHING to increase participation rates. We have more pro sport these days than in the past, and yet people are less active and fatter.

Would you believe someone who said with no factual basis that they were from Nigeria and wanted to mail you millions of dollars if you gave them your bank details? Would you believe anyone who said that there are fairies at the bottom of their garden, without giving any factual evidence for their claims? Would you believe anyone who said that they had invented perpetual motion but gave you no evidence?

Since we have been given no evidence for the claim that mainly promoting high performance is good for the sport, why should we believe it - particularly when a look at what people are really sailing shows that they normally prefer slower boats. The case to say that promoting high performance makes the sport appear elitist, costly, overly difficult and impractical is quite an easy one to prove - for example when Peter Johnson (of 49er, J Boat and Gunboat fame) ran a major US survey about attitudes to dinghy sailing he found that people did NOT think it was boring but they did think it was inaccessible. Promoting the sport as if it was all about skiffs and fast craft can merely highlight the inaccessible end and therefore drive people away, as it did with windsurfing.

In my own family we've had some of the fastest craft (of their type or absolutely) around so I love fast craft, but there is no factual basis to say that they are the way to promote the sport. People can believe that, of course, but it's just an act of faith and it seems odd to some of other to abuse others merely because they don't share your own faith.