YouthSailing, the RYA and Catamarans

An improvement.

Although 'assist the multihull classes' doesn't sound like 'taking responsibility' to me.

We still need members of F16, Hurricane, Dart, Shearwater, SNECCA, at next Mondays meeting for true credibility. etc...

And there should be a 'catamaran' committee or an explicit undertaking to consult with all catamaran classes on a quarterly/bi-annual basis with agendas circulated before hand to allow the classes to discuss them at agm's etc before hand.

A problem I can see with Chris249's Heavyweight Singlehander being the one to drop purely on participation terms is that it leaves only one spot open to those above average weight, that of Star crew, and even there a weight limit is in place. In Athletics, you have events for all the weights, from long distance running to throwing the shotput. We need that in sailing. The light weight men have only 470 helming really to compete for, (someone correct me if the 49er can be sailed by a small person) so we don't want to narrow the bands any more. After all, the Yanks have to be able to fit in something!

Sorry, that was off thread again. Back on thread, I think that the ISAF need to get their act together and find a decent youth training boat. Didn't they vote for the KL16 or something, last time, and then get totally ignored because it was a pathetic choice? Trouble is, I suppose, that a decent youth training cat will cost more than a decent youth monohull.

 

Lets keep the fight going good to see the rethink on the youth side however we need the RYA to back the multi's for the Olympics. If the RYA dig their heels in we need to support other national bodies to make the right decision. By the way has Dame Ellen signed up to the petition yet, if not can someone give her a nudge.

Originally posted by Guest#260 Chris, Which classes have/do you include for the analysis of the heavyweight single-hander?

I think it was Finn (41) Phantom (70) and OK (43). I assumed any heavies in Solos would be balanced by lightweights in OKs. Probably leaving out the 50 Contenders was a mistake.

As you may have noted, the "modern high-performance singlehanders" (Blaze, RS 700, AC, MPS,  Moth) have been left out - partly because there have been proposals for them to be a separate discipline and partly because they are hard to categorise for weights and I'd guess that their sailor represent a broad spectrum and therefore would not tilt the overall weight of singlehanders either way.

I didn't want to go nto detail as my posts are already too long and boring.

I was going to post that on the Continent I think the heavyweights are much better represented, whereas in Australia and the USA the heavyweight classes are surprisingly small. Then I took the time to go through the French national rankings (http://www.ffvoile.net/ffv/sportif/). There's 148 adult males in the Radials, and 111 overall in Finns. So even in that case, and ignoring the Europe, Laser etc sailors, the "ultralight males" outnumber the heavyweight males - yet the heavies get a medal and the lightweights don't. Still, in Germany there's a lot of big guys in Finns and O Jolle.

I'm not claiming these are definitive or accurate figures - but surely they are a lot better than going on gut feeling. It shouldn't be up to us to try to get some grip on the numbers, ISAF should have all this sort of stuff at their fingertips if they had any grip on grass roots and national level sailing.


Edited by Chris 249

Originally posted by johnready And there should be a 'catamaran' committee or an explicit undertaking to consult with all catamaran classes on a quarterly/bi-annual basis with agendas circulated before hand to allow the classes to discuss them at agm's etc before hand.

Yeah right. Sounds like bureaucracy gone mad... Presumably you back the same thing for all the monohull classes as well, or do you think multihulls desrve special treatment? What a nightmare that would be to organise!