Olympic Diary: August 4 - The breeze comes to Marseille. More on the iQFoil Final fiasco
by Richard Gladwell/Sail-World.com/nz 5 Aug 10:13 BST
4 August 2024
Emil Jarudd & Hanna Jonsson (SWE) in the Mixed Multihull on August 3 in Marseille at the Paris 2024 Olympic Regatta © Robert Deaves /
www.robertdeaves.uk
For the first time at the 2024 Olympic Regatta, Marseille turned on the breeze most fans expected - a nice Force 3-4 with a surfable seaway.
A nice little swell under the chop made surfing even more viable but caused the Nacra sailors some grief.
While the official storyline focused on the Kites' first hit-out in Olympic competition, the real story of the day was the fabulous racing in the Nacra 17.
The history of multihulls in the Olympics has not been good.
The Rodney March-designed Tornado catamaran was selected for the 1976 Olympics after a set of trials, despite a rig redesign during an Annual Conference by the then-ISAF rule-makers. It was dropped for the 2012 Olympics in London. That was short-lived after Oracle, and Alinghi sailed off for the 2010 America's Cup, and ISAF was almost shamed into putting a multihull back into the Five Ring Circus.
The Nacra 17 came in for the 2016 Olympics in Rio and had been bedevilled with various issues as rule-makers tried to make the catamaran into something it was never designed to do.
But on Sunday, all was forgiven as we were treated to the sight of the mixed crew, now aboard a fully foiling catamaran, turning in a superb display of high-speed sailing. They showed scintillating boatspeed in the rough water, along with some inspired boat handling by the crews to get the foiler around the course and recover from several near capsize/nosedive situations, which are all part of sailing foilers that are not boards.
To the surprise of no-one, the racing was dominated by four-time world and defending Olympic champions Ruggerio Tita and Catarina Banti (ITA. They won five of the six races. The Kiwi crew of Micah Wilkinson and Erica Dawson stepped up to record two seconds and a third and lie second overall.
The Nacras are halfway through their Qualification series, with six races to sail. They will not be subject to the nonsensical Medal race format that we saw for the Windsurfing on Saturday and will sail the usual format Medal race contested by the top ten from the Qualifiers. If Tita and Chanti have the Gold medal sewn up before the 13th race, then good on them, and the sailing world should celebrate a well-deserved win without having the Medals decided by some ill-conceived gimmick race.
Time for a Change
This Olympic regatta has been one of great change for sailing. Five of the ten events have been changed from Tokyo 2020, and half of the classes are now foilers.
That change was debated a lot, and for better or worse, the changes have been made—and no doubt there are some adjustments to come.
One of those must mean the scrapping of the crazy Medal Race system used in the windsurfers, which sees the top competitor in the Qualifying round sit out the Quarter and Semi-Finals and then come in cold into in the Grand Final.
The serious shortcoming of the Medal Race format, is that the series leader misses the preliminary racing, come up against competitors who are running hot after one or two preliminary Finals, and invariably the series leader gets beaten. In the Women's Worlds and Europeans, 2024 Olympic Bronze medalist Emma Wilson (GBR) has been on the wrong side of this stacked final system several times.
Aside from Saturday's Finals aberration, a look through the results of World and European championships over the last couple of years shows the same pattern, of the series leader on a hiding to nowhere, which is repeated each time in the Men's and Women's events.
At the 2024 Women's World Championships, Emma Wilson won the qualifiers by a massive 78-point margin - scoring 21 points to the winner's 99 points under the low-points system used in sailing. But she missed the title, just as happened in last week in the 2024 Olympics.
Some would claim that while Wilson is outstanding at course racing, she is not so capable at short course racing—and claim that is the heart of the issue.
That is a cheap shot. From what we've been able to see, Wilson is usually the top qualifier, and no one in the women's fleet has ever gone cold into the Final, and won.
The problem in the Women's Race occurred when Emma Wilson rounded the bottom mark for the first time, and the other two stacked up inside her. All three were on starboard tack and Wilson was blocked from tacking until the other two had gone. At that point, the third-place competitor and eventual Gold Medalist Marta Margetti tactically controlled the race.
Having raced on the same course a few minutes previously, Margetti would have known roughly where the shift/bend on the breeze lay, and she picked it to perfection. The inevitable outcome of Wilson's tactical dilemma was that every metre she sailed after Martha Margetti tacked away was a metre wasted. The sum of those metres proved to be Margetti's winning margin. For sure, she and Sharon Kantor sailed a smart, very basic - two tack - tactical Leg 3 - but did that move on a short seven-minute, five-leg race wipe out a 52pt margin in Wilson's favour from the 14-race qualifying series, in which she won eight races?
It's a similar pattern in the Men's event, where the top qualifier never wins the Medal racing; we were going to say "lottery", but all have an equal chance in a lottery. This Finals system is no lottery. The odds are systematically stacked against the winner of the Qualifiers - those who have sailed well over many races in varying weather.
"Mentally, I love the sport, but I hate the format," Wilson commented at what must have been a very difficult Medalists Media Conference for the 25-year-old Brit, who won the Bronze Medal in the RS:X Windsurfer at Tokyo2020.
Luuc van Opzeeland (NED) suffered the same fate as Wilson in the 2024 World Championships, winning the 19-race Qualifying Series by 70pts, but still finished second after the sudden death Final series.
"The format has its pros and cons," he said at the Male Medalists Media Conference. "For me personally, seeing things happen like Emma Wilson losing the way she did is a bit painful. And I don't think it's befitting the Sport. We're doing a sport that takes five days—even six—it's hard to put it all on the line in a three-minute race.
"I don't think that's right, especially for people as far ahead as she is.
"I do think that if you're the best you should be able to show it in every moment.
"So it's a bit hard and a bit harsh to say - 'Hey, we're gonna give medals out in four-minute races'.
Emma Wilson also had a few ideas on the situation, to logically extend the sudden death system a lot further.
"If we're going to use this format, let's just do it one day. Let's go to one day of qualifying and then do a Medal series.
"Why do we bother to do sometimes 22 races, and then we kill ourselves on one day."
"We're all great athletes. And we all want a fair way to race and a fair way to get medals, and I just think there could be a better way."
"If they want to change the way sports are going, let's just do Saturday, let's race then, and on Sunday, we do the Medal series—something like that instead of dragging it on," she added.
The surprising aspect of the way the Final is set up is that it was passed by World Sailing in the first place. The world governing body should be standing up for an even playing field. Even if they had passed the system initially as experimental, they should have picked the issues up early in a review process and killed it.
Similarly, for the Class Association - who must have known what was happening - but apparently did nothing.
The sailors are in a difficult position, as evidenced by the media conference. Complain too loudly, and it looks like sour grapes. Say too little, and the sailors will get more of the same.
Blaming "the media" is just nonsense and a cop-out. Where have "the media" ever asked for a system as flawed as this?
The standard Sailing Olympic Medal race system does the job—rewarding those who have put together a strong series while providing the excitement we saw at the end of the Women's Skiff at Paris 2024, as seen in the Men's Skiff in Tokyo 2020, and the Women's Skiff at Rio 2016.
Of course, staying with the current system will mean that its aberrations will get exploited. A competitor with a big points lead could elect not to start in a couple of races, drop back into the Quarter Finals, and get two races in for practice ahead of the main event. It's probably not something that would be tried first in the Olympics, but it's worth a go in a Europeans.
Would that get "the media" excited? Depends on whether they know anything about sailing, I guess.
On Monday, there will be racing in the six remaining events.
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