There's nothing like the funeral of a well-loved and well-liked sailor to bring old friends out of the woodwork. Ovi's funeral in Tynemouth brought out the great and the good from the sailing world, and there were probably about six or seven hundred people in total. Half of them couldn't even fit in the church for the service, but I hope they got to hear it because there were some very moving tributes to the great man.
Ovi was always there for a laugh and joke, and he liked a drink at the bar. But if there was somebody with a broken boat midway through a regatta, Ovi would invariably be there, sleeves rolled up, and hands covered in resin and fibreglass, until the job was done. When it came to helping other people, Ovi couldn't help himself.
Not only did Ovi love to help others, but he couldn't bear to see a job done anything less than perfectly. That was one of the other messages that came through at his funeral, just what a perfectionist he was. It was why his boats have won so many championships over the years. It was great to see so many boatbuilders making the effort to be there, a sign of the respect that Ovi commanded in his chosen profession.
Not least was Julian Bethwaite's decision to fly over from Sydney for the occasion. Between Julian and Ovi - along with Kiwi boatbuilder Dave Mackay - these guys have been responsible for propagating the skiff revolution around the world. The 49er and 29er have become established as modern classics and they have also provided the inspiration for many other new lightweight dinghies over the past decade. Ovi will leave a long legacy behind him.
The Niner revolution is pressing ahead, meanwhile, with the imminent launch of two new designs from the Bethwaite stable, the 29er X and the 79er (a canting-keeled 8-metre keelboat of which more another time). As its name implies, the 29er X is an evolution from the existing 29er. The X stands for Extreme, and it is a fair name for the boat, being a bigger rig, twin-trapeze version of the standard boat. I got the chance to sail it recently on Sydney Harbour and it was quite a frisky ride. I haven't sailed the standard 29er so I don't have a direct comparison to make, but the boat did feel like a mini-49er upwind and a good deal hairier than a 49er downwind. It was ballistic.
It would have been good to put the boat through a proper test but 29er X is still in the development stage. Julian Bethwaite is having a new rig built for it and plans to chop around the sail plan until the boat achieves the right balance. It was 95 per cent there but the mainsail:jib ratio needs to change and Julian thinks the kite is too big and powerful at the moment. Bearing in mind Julian is planning on marketing the 29er X as a twin-trapeze skiff for girls, that could well be the case.
Certainly, the girls who tested the boat that day were finding the boat a bit of a handful, and these are two highly qualified 29er sailors. The helm in particular, Jacqui Bonnitcha, has been making a name for herself as an 18-foot skiff sailor in recent months, and the talented 18-year-old even took a race off all the boys in one of their Sunday races on Sydney Harbour. She is certainly a name to watch for the future.
Jacqui took half an hour to get to grips with helming the 29er X, and she was looking forward to sailing it again in its more refined state. It is a challenging little boat but Julian is pitching it at sailors of a high standard. His ultimate goal would be to see the 29er X take its place alongside the 49er as an Olympic class, but for the girls. What a TV draw for the Olympics that would be.
Talking of TV in the Olympics, one of the discussions I've been having with other members of the 49er World Association is trying to come up with a new scoring system which guarantees to keep the excitement of the racing going until the very last gasp of a championship. You may remember the ruckus that Paul Henderson and ISAF caused a year ago it was announced that the Olympic Games in Athens would be a no-discard series. Serious objections from sailors around the world brought an end to that venture.
It's easy to see the sailors' point of view. Ben Ainslie was one of the most vocal objectors and he wanted that discard back in the series to take account of unpredictable events that can occur beyond your control and ruin your regatta (such as French sailors protesting you out on a dubious port/starboard incident). Actually, so amazing was Ben's bounce back from that torrid first day that he would have won the regatta - even without a discard.
But you can see his argument, that you want that get-out-of-jail-free card that the traditional one-discard-in-a-series offers. Then again, when you look at other sports in the Olympics, you have one shot to get it right and if you blow it, your world caves in. Think of Linford Christie when he was attempting to defend his 100m Olympic title in Atlanta back in 1996, when he false started twice and four years' work went down the tubes.
So should sailing submit itself more to a death-or-glory format? Well, having witnessed the Farr 40 and Mumm 30 Worlds where there is no luxury of a discard, I would say the format has a lot to recommend it. Consistency across the series becomes more crucial than ever, and nothing is ever decided until the final race - unless of course someone has so dominated the series that they can still afford to count a Did Not Compete in their final score. The no-discard series makes that scenario highly unlikely but it doesn't preclude it altogether.
While winning with a race to spare is a thrilling achievement for the sailor, from a media perspective this is a disaster. So what the 49er class is seeking is a format that absolutely guarantees excitement until the very last race. In fact, the holy grail is to design a system that sees the winner of the final race become the winner of the whole championship. If you ever saw the Ben Ainslie v Robert Scheidt showdown in the final race of the Lasers in Sydney five years ago, you'll remember the massive media attention that their match race attracted. It was just about the biggest thing in the Olympics that day, regardless of whether you were British, Brazilian or from anywhere else in the world.
Ironically, the new scoring systems being considered would mean that we never see that sort of match race take place again. It was only the fact that Ainslie and Scheidt had such a points advantage over the rest of the fleet that their match race could take place at all. But it's not so much the circumstances as the excitement of that great moment that a new scoring system is looking to emulate. The other side of the same coin is the more that you take the event ‘down to the wire', the more pressure you pile on the sailors, and potentially the more luck comes into the equation. Will the top sailors sign up to a format so weighted on the final race? I can't see it myself, but then again, should the Olympic racing format be the choice of the sailor or the choice of the media and the public? It's a tough call.
Remember that sailing went through quite a revolution after the Barcelona Games in 1992. This was the last time the 470s and other classes raced on the old-style triangle-sausage course, with legs over a mile long. Since Savannah 1996 it's all been about short courses around trapezoids, and it has called for a different style of sailing, with far more importance placed on getting off the start line cleanly.
You'd have thought that someone who won a gold medal around the short courses of Athens last year would be a fan of the format. But US 470 crew Kevin Burnham actually despises it. "These short courses are a video game," is how he put it to me when we chatted in Sydney recently. He is well placed to make the comparison between the old and new, as he also won a silver medal at the Barcelona Games 12 years earlier.
Despite his success in Athens last year, he still hankers after the ‘good old days' of longer courses. "You could get into a rhythm and you could play the shifts," he says. These days there's quite often only time for one shift to come through the course when the beats are so short, which means you've got to pick a side and hope it's the right one. Downwind, Kevin says you can never find clear air because everyone else is all over you. There isn't sufficient distance on the run for people to break out to one side or the other.
So which is right and which is wrong? Who can say? What are we trying to measure in sailing? The long course provided a greater test of superior boatspeed and an ability to work the best of an oscillating breeze. The short course puts greater emphasis on blasting out of the start and getting out first to the favoured side. They're all valid skills, so how should we decide what takes precedence?
The increasing pressure for sailing to change comes from the demands of TV. Kevin thinks TV is an irrelevance, however. Whilst he loves racing 470s and at the age of 50 still hasn't ruled out the possibility of defending his Olympic title in China three years from now, he says watching 470s is boring. His view is that they should just be allowed to get on with their racing in the best fashion possible, regardless of what the TV producers might be demanding.
Some people say that sailing needs to sharpen up its TV act because they believe the sport is hanging on by its fingernails to Olympic status, although I think that's scaremongering. With the International Olympic Committee presided over by Jacques Rogge, a former Finn sailor, it's hard to think it's under too much threat. If Qingdao proves to be the windless nightmare that many are predicting for the Olympic regatta, then that would do the sport no favours. But you'd hope that the decision makers would be able to look beyond one substandard regatta and simply make sure that the venue for 2012 can offer up better wind.
I would love to see more sailing on TV, but the criteria that should take precedence over all others is whether or not the athletes are enjoying their racing. To put the interests of TV and commerce entirely ahead of the wishes of the sailors would be to put the cart before the horse. If we can find a racing format that keeps both the TV producer and the sailor happy, fantastic. But it won't be an easy task.
