I wonder if ISAF could have predicted the maelstrom of protest that
would be caused by the announcement of the 10 Events for the Olympic Regatta in
Weymouth 2012. No women's skiff, and more controversially, no multihull. After
a week of in-depth discussions and strategic thinking about a brighter future
for Olympic sailing, with the sub-committees working their way through the pros
and cons of the various Events on the table, none of this mattered a bean once
the 40 members of ISAF Council sat down to place their votes. People have their
agenda, and they stick to them.
There was an eleventh-hour change of voting procedure - nominally to
speed up the process but which some cynics say was engineered by the keelboat
lobby to open up the opportunity for a bit of horsetrading and tactical voting.
It went from a ‘what-would-you-eliminate' vote to a ‘what-would-you-like-keep'
vote. According to those who understand voting systems better than I, there can
be quite a difference in outcomes depending on which you choose.
With the voting procedure altered, the keelboat lobby was either very
lucky or very clever, because it had turned around a situation where there were
no keelboats on the roster proposed by the Events Committee midway through the
week. This was widely accepted as a progressive line-up of Events which
included the Men's Multihull and Women's High Performance Dinghy.
However, in the meeting that mattered, ISAF Council selected the Men's
Keelboat ahead of the Multihull by just two votes, and Women's Match Racing
ahead of Women's Skiff by just one vote. Oh so painfully close for what could
have been a breath of fresh air in Olympic sailing.
The multihull world has been up in arms since, and rightly so. The
exclusion of a catamaran from the Games leaves a yawning gap in the Olympic
line-up. Of course, it could be argued that excluding the keelboats could have
been equally unrepresentative of sailing. But keelboats fulfil so few of the
criteria which are deemed important by IOC and even ISAF itself. Affordable and
accessible they're not, and media-friendly they're not. Keelboats are
logistically complicated to campaign, and play to the strengths of the more
organised, wealthy nations. Hardly a way to help grow the sport among the
emerging nations.
I wonder if the multihull sailors will be able to organise themselves
sufficiently well to actually achieve a turnaround. There is an online petition
asking for the multihull to be reinstated. I signed it, and I suspect many
other high-performance sailing fans did.
However, I think the cat fraternity could have made a much stronger
case for reinstatement if they had asked for reconsideration alongside a
women's high performance dinghy. This would take them out of being a one-issue
problem to being part of a much wider problem, ie excluded from a roster of
Olympic classes that currently is retrospective rather than being progressive
and forward looking, as it could have been with the inclusion of a multihull
and women's skiff.
The problem is that some multihull sailors see a conspiracy at work
here. Take, for example, the reaction of Mike Grandfield, chairman of the
International Tornado Association, who was there during the ISAF Conference in
Estoril. "The bottom line right now is that Multihull sailing has no seat at
the ISAF table. And, ISAF has voted that it is a monohull organisation." The
decision in Estoril may have been wrong, but what it wasn't was a multihull
witch hunt. Such misplaced paranoia does a disservice to the cat community.
As long as some people continue to take this apartheid attitude to
sailing, where they see this division between sailors as either being on one
hull or two hulls, then they are going to find it hard to gain influence where
it counts. I have to say, I'm not entirely comfortable just writing about
monohulls while Jeremy Evans writes exclusively about multis. But that is the
way the labour is divided within this magazine. More importantly, this ‘them
and us' mentality is rife in some online forums, and it's not pretty. Badmouthing
your fellow sailors just because they choose to sail a different type of boat
to you - it's not a great way to go about winning friends and influencing
people.
If the multihull lobby went to ISAF with a solution rather than a
complaint, it might get a better reception. Here's an idea for starters - a
five-day, long-distance stage race from Weymouth and finishing under London
Bridge. It would be a spectacular addition to the 2012 regatta, it would
connect Weymouth to the London Olympics, and the only type of boat that could
deliver this Event would be a multihull. Probably a bit late in the day to
propose it, but worth a try. At a stroke, it would make the multihull the most
thrilling part of the Olympic Regatta.
Whatever pleas or protest people make, and however justified they may
be, it's hard to see ISAF changing its mind at this stage. But it must be
severely embarrassed that its own long-term aims have again been derailed by a
few ISAF Council members pursuing their own agenda. The Americans have been
widely blamed for where they placed their votes, by the way, but if ever there
was a nation that is wedded to its small keelboats it's the USA. So can you
blame them for voting for the Men's Keelboat and Women's Match Racing?
My point is, ISAF shouldn't allow itself to be washed back and forth
on the votes of a few people whose own objectives don't match its own. US
Sailing took a ‘George Bush' approach to foreign policy, and did what was right
for the American people at the expense of what was good for the wider world of
sailing. Understandable, but regrettable.
While it seems to me US Sailing voted selfishly, the RYA appears to
have voted for what it saw as the best long-term interests of the sport. It
voted Multihull instead of Keelboat, despite the fact that the Star has yielded
more British success in the past 20 years than the Tornado. And it voted
Women's High Performance (where there is no track record at senior level
although encouraging signs at youth level) instead of Women's Match Racing,
which many predict will play even more into the hands of the wealthy and
organised nations such as GBR.
Goran Petersson has been criticised for not using more of his clout as
ISAF President in leading the proceedings with a firmer hand in Estoril. Now he
and his colleagues are paying the price. But will they allow it to happen
again? The self-serving nature of ISAF Council plainly isn't working. The
Estoril debacle makes Petersson looks weak, and he is up for re-election next
year. The best thing he could do is drive through some serious reform and come
up with a system that is far less reliant on lobbying and backroom politics.
So what's the solution? Either a benign dictatorship, or outright
democracy. We can't have this wishy-washy half-way house of fudged decisions
that continue to impede ISAF and the development of the sport. But is there
such a think as a benign dictator? The previous ISAF President, Paul Henderson,
ran a form of dictatorship. It did at least get things done. He railroaded the
49er into the Olympics, perhaps 10 or 20 years before it might otherwise have
done so. Few have had much cause for complaint since then. The 49er is one of
the most respected classes in the Olympic line-up. But Henderson also rubbed
people up the wrong way, and to some was unnecessarily confrontational.
The alternative, democracy, sounds all very nice. But how to put it
into practice? Through the Internet! Run a survey of every sailor that is
currently participating in an Olympic campaign, and also every sailor that
attended the past few ISAF Youth World Championships. Perhaps extend it to
other events such as the sailing competitors in the Asian Games. Ask them what
Events and what type of boats these people would like to be sailing in the
future. This would not be difficult to do.
ISAF has already done most of the hard work. To take part in an ISAF
graded regatta, you have to sign up to the ISAF Sailor scheme at www.sailing.org, and you are required to
provide an email address. This means ISAF already has the database it needs to
conduct a survey. So ask the sailors what they want! Allow them to say what
they would really like to sail in an ideal world. In these days of modern
technology, there is really no excuse for not engaging with the wider sailing
community. It's dead cheap to do, and it would make sailors feel like ISAF was
listening to them. They don't have that feeling at the moment.
Combine this democratic survey of the people actively competing at the
top levels of Olympic and youth competition with a small, lean executive
committee who would take the broad findings of the sailors and work it into a
strategic plan. But hang on, doesn't ISAF have just such a body? Yes, it's
called the Events Committee which, based on what emerged from its proposals was
judged by many to be presenting a very progressive, well considered strategy
for ISAF Council to approve. Except it wasn't approved.
The Events Committee doesn't hold the power. If it did, I would be
writing a much more upbeat Roll Tacks. But I'm not, because the power - and the
problem - lies with ISAF Council. This is where tactical expediency overcomes
strategic planning. For example, I am told there were two practising
international judges who failed to declare a personal interest in the outcome
of the vote. If you were an international judge, which would you vote for: a
women's skiff or women's match racing? The match racing of course, because it
offers lots of lovely trips to exotic venues for the international judges
fortunate enough to be invited. A cynical interpretation of events this may be,
but these people are only human, and it's pretty easy to justify to yourself
that you've just made ‘the right decision' for sailing when faced with two good
choices.
Actually, I'm not so sure that women's match racing will turn out to
be such a great answer for Olympic sailing. While it's cheap for a team of
women to jump on the plane with their sailing gear and rock up to a regatta
with provided boats, who's going to pay for those boats, and who's going to
cover the cost of all the judges and boats that are part and parcel of
top-level match racing? The only way I can see it working is by turning the
existing women's tour into the Olympic circuit, which means it will be
operating in isolation from the rest of the Olympic classes. Unless ISAF is
very careful, its new found love for women's match racing could be another case
of ‘marry in haste, repent at leisure'. A bit like the Yngling, when you think
about it.
