Thursday, August 13, 2009

The Cat is Dead. Long Live the Cat!


The cat is dead.

There will be no multihull class in the 2012 Olympics.

The IOC President Jacques Rogge wrote today to ISAF: “Whilst the IOC Executive Board fully recognises the value that Sailing brings to the Olympic Games, it decided to maintain its decision of 2005 regarding the overall quota of sailors and medals. As a consequence, Tornado Multihull shall not be on the programme of the Games of the XXXth Olympiad in London.

Oh well. Multihull fans will just have to be satisfied with watching the America's Cup next February in Ras al-Khaimah.



Long live the cat!

10 comments:

Joe Rouse said...

Boo hoo....Solo bromeando. It's time to add surfing to the Olympics.

Thomas Armstrong said...

Idiotic. Though I'd rather see 'A'Class cats, but they are already a developmental class and with Olympic status I guess things would get out of hand.

Smilicus said...

Only true sailing is Monohull sailing

tillerman said...

Right on Smilicus. Real sailors don't need training wheels.

Pat said...

If ISAF keeps kicking out the more exciting, friendly, crowd-pleasing classes in favor of the same-old-same-old, don't be surprised if we see the International Olympic Committee to remove another class within the the next couple of quadrenniums ... and then another ....

The demographics of the Olympic classes are bad for expanding sailing's appeal and popularity; the Olympic sailing classes are heavy in boats with two white boys on board.

Tillerman said...

"The demographics of the Olympic classes are bad for expanding sailing's appeal and popularity; the Olympic sailing classes are heavy in boats with two white boys on board."

Pat, ignoring for now the "white" issue I don't think the facts support your assertion that the "Olympic sailing classes are heavy in boats with two... boys on board".

At the 2008 Olympics there were 11 classes. Only 4 of these - Star, 470, 49er and Tornado - were for "two boys". (I am ignoring the fiction that the 49er and Tornado were actually open to men and women.) 4 classes were for women only and 5 were single-handed.

If you think there were too many classes for "two white boys" then you should applaud the dropping of the Tornado as there will now only be 3 classes for "two boys" (of whatever color) in 2012.

Pat said...

My 'druthers would have been to drop the 470 and/or Star, since the 49er and Tornado provide fine excitement. I'd be willing to give up both the 470 and the Star to get an exciting cat class.

The Star just barely represents keelboats; with only the one two-man keelboat (no chute) there's not much representation (not counting women's match racing). Wanna' see some guys on a keelboat pop up with a big chute at the Olympics? Sorry, it's not gonna' happen.

Windsurfing is almost a separate sport. Set windsurfing aside and women have that much less than equal representation in the sailing events. Equal opportunity perhaps isn't quite established in the ISAF/IOC realm (and, yes, a huge lot of grassroots and leadership work would be needed to get more women in the sport).

Women at least get a match-racing event, which the lads don't.

If the development issues (propagating enough boats around the world) could be solved, I'd love to see the women get a more visually exciting, higher-performance boat than the 470. The 470 may be intricate to master and sail well, but that doesn't necessarily translate into audience appeal, and there are other boats that offer plenty of challenge.

Only women get a up to a crew of three; even though lots of real world sailing is about coordinated crew work, in the Olympic men's events that only happens on a two-man scale. Nowhere in the Olympics is there anything remotely close to a display of the power of larger crewed boats. And don't even think about seeing something like team racing.

Aside: Basic television access to sailing events for the Beijing Olympics was horrible in the USA. Since US advertising dollars are a significant influence, whatever the sport authorities may say, that doesn't bode well for Olympic sailing.

What does the Olympics need to boost sailing viewership? Maybe something like women's slalom obstacle hazard white water high-performance spinnaker large catamaran match racing sailing? Hmmmm....

O Docker said...

An expanded version of the Ras al-Khaimah video with some very cool shots of both boats under way. Don't miss the helo transporting Alinghi across the alps. This ain't your father's America's Cup!

Oh, the audio's in, well, I guess you can turn the sound off.

Joe said...

Did you know there are more surfers in the world than sailors and windsurfers combined?

ThreeSheets said...

Surfing is obviously far easier, then :-D

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