Why sailing is not long for the Olympics!

I lied. I said I would watch the online feeds of sailing but the NBC Olympic website didn't seem to like my FIOS password so I was just as happy to watch the regular broadcasts of team handball, field hockey, water polo and like wacky Olympic sports.

I did check the Olympic sailing results daily. Not good for the USA team but, hey, this might be fodder for a later post (everybody and his mother in the bloggosphere have jumped on this one - why not me?). This post goes beyond USA mediocrity; this post, on why sailing should be booted from the Olympics, was triggered by two Web events;

1. An Irish fellow put up a comical short clip of one of the Women's Laser Radial starts at Weymouth. The video went viral. His roll-in-the-aisle commentary, where he confused the start with the finish, unfortunately hit too close to home. I imagine for the mass of non-sailors watching a sailboat race, the Irishman's humorous play-by-play rang more of truth than satirical sendup.
2. And over at SailingAnarchy, they pointed out a misguided New York Times op/ed piece that argues sailing has no place in the Olympics; its too elitist, expensive, and exclusive. (I won't counter Bomani Jone's - the author - suppositions here, lets just say he's wrong, typical of the Internet he just shot from the hip with no research whatsoever.)

But sailing is not long for the Olympics because it is not a spectator sport... period. Fleet racing will never be a spectator sport because the masses that give BBC and NBC and the IOC the TV ratings will never understand sailboat racing. I equate watching fleet racing in sailboats with watching a marathon organized on the Rosie Ruiz rules. You will start at one place, after that you may run off where you want to, hither and yon, and at the 25 mile mark you assemble in some order to finish. One can argue that the latest video technology, where we can view animations of sailboats racing and where we can draw imaginary lines showing who are the leaders and who are the followers even though they are often widely scattered about the course; all this makes sailboat racing more understandable to the Average Joe. What other Olympic sport do you need video animations to make it understandable as to who is winning and who is losing?

Now for Exhibit B. If you bought tickets to the Weymouth Oympic Sailing competition you were allowed up on a hill on the shoreline that supposedly had the best view of the racing courses. So lets say you bought some tickets to watch the exciting medal race of the Women's 470 class. Oops, we forgot the binoculars. What exactly did I get for my money. Lets go to the videotape (as local sportscaster George Michael used to say).



2012 Olympics - Women's 470 class Medal Race from Tim Laws on Vimeo.


Though it pains me to say this; it looks like kitesailing, which is about as far away from typical sailboat racing as you can get and still call it sailboat racing, kitesailing may be the one Olympic sailing discipline that will pull in the average TV viewer.

Catamarans, the Olympics, the Swedish Archipelago

The Tornado is out of the Olympics. I don't know of any sailor that doesn't think it's a dumb idea. At the Quindao Olympics, while the Tornado's were handling the breezy and lumpy medal race with aplomb, the 49'ers were doing their version of the Monty Python Twit of the Year Race (he's up, he's down and, although I've sailed in many a breezy race with multiple capsizes, I expected more of the Olympic medal race).

Well here is my suggestion to the Cat crowd. Don't attempt to reenter the Olympic Circus using the old format. You've developed a far more appealing race format; long distance, multi-stage day racing with many stops, in high speed two man cats. We have the Tybee 500 in the U.S and in Europe there is the Swedish Archipelago Raid.

Just imagine a five day marathon catamaran race in the Olympics with multiple stops up and down the host countries coastline. A very appealing sailing competition to capture the attention of the masses.

Here is a YouTube of Day 1 of the 2009 Swedish Archipelago Raid.




P.S Steve Clark had this idea a while back that the Olympic Finn competition should be a one race, 24 hour long marathon. I think a sailing marathon works better with the cats.