Can the Star pull another fast one?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are out in St Petersburg to determine the future of Olympic sailing. It’s the ISAF Mid-Year Meeting, and yesterday the Events Committee secured a 60% majority in favour of the following events and equipment:

• Board and/or Kiteboard men & women - RS:X/Kiteboard - evaluation
• One-person dinghy men - Laser
• One-person dinghy men women - Laser Radial
• 2nd one-person dinghy men - Finn
• Two-person dinghy (spinnaker) men & women - 470
• Skiff men - 49er
• Skiff women - equipment evaluation
• Two-person multihull mixed - equipment evaluation

This is almost exactly the same slate put forward by the Events Committee four years ago.

No keelboats.

But you may remember that in Cascais 2007, ISAF Council rejected the proposals of the expert analysis and narrowly voted the Star in ahead of the Tornado.

After the nuclear fallout of that decision, there’s no way the multihull is going to be displaced this time, but the Star still has friends in high places. Word from St Petersburg is that the Brazil Olympic Committee (not the sailing committee, but the national Olympic committee) are leaning hard on ISAF to keep the Star in for Rio 2016. Having gleaned so many medals in the Star from the likes of Torben Grael and Robert Scheidt over the past few Olympiads, you can see why the Brazilians want to keep the venerable old keelboat in the Games.

And if the Star gets back in again, it won’t be without precedent. We’ve already mentioned 2007, but what about Sydney 2000 when somehow the Star somehow snuck back in to create an 11th event where previously only 10 had been sanctioned?

The Star class has a potent ally at the top table of ISAF, the Executive Committee, in vice-president Eric Tulla from Puerto Rico. The rumour mill says Tulla will be pushing hard to get the Star back in for Rio, and that he is bringing three of the remaining six vice-presidents with him in pushing for the original submission from Puerto Rico to be considered. The keelboats, for men and women, would stay in, and the skiffs would be out.

If Tulla really has managed to convince fellow VPs, Alberto Predieri, Tomasz Holc and Nazli Imre, to push for a submission that earned no votes from the 29 available from the Events Committee vote, then we know that ISAF has learned nothing from the debacle of 2007. We will know that the Federation remains as corrupt - or at the very least, corruptible - as it was four years ago.

The keelboat ticks few - if any - of the boxes laid down in the IOC criteria. It’s expensive and inaccessible to any but the 20 wealthiest nations in the world. The skiff ticks at least a few boxes. It’s accessible and it’s what the kids aspire to go racing in. This is the conclusion that has led the Events Committee to reach the majority decision that it reached today, and indeed four years ago. The skiff is seen as part of the future, the keelboat as part of the elitist past.

But will the committee of experts, the Executive Committee - find itself ignored once again? It would be an almighty slap in the face, but not for the first time. The frustrating thing about reporting on ISAF events that as a journalist, you get bombarded with calls from people saying all hell is breaking loose, but no one prepared to go on the record and tell the world what they’re thinking.

If the off-the-record comments are to be believed, however, then people are wandering around in St Petersburg in a state of shock, wondering if sailing is about to be dragged back in time, and that the hard and detailed research put in by Phil Jones’s Olympic Commission has come to nothing. The OC report found that keelboats would have a hard time justifying their existence in an Olympic Regatta that would address the IOC’s criteria for inclusion. So it will be interesting to learn exactly why Tulla thinks the Star deserves to stay.

After the embarrassment of Cascais 2007, it’s hard to imagine that ISAF - and the president Goran Petersson in particular - could allow themselves to be bullied by minority interests once again. The next three days in St Petersburg will show if ISAF has learned anything, or if it is prepared to continue gambling with the future of sailing in the Olympic Games by allowing single-interest lobbies and back scratching to prevail.

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