GB Sailing Challenge - still confused

Precisely - and when such a format is being presented as the future of dinghy sailing, or certainly given an artificial level of gravitas behind the veil of data manipulation, I’m afraid a ‘dinghy development’ forum might well find a few people a little cynical about it.   

I guess my concern is that if dinghy sailing is pushed down this avenue, then we are set to lose even more of its past romance.  We form emotional attachments to boats. We give them names.   Those of us geeky enough have even give them genders based on the Northern or Southern Hemisphere design lineage.   I’m sure mine is not the only wife to compare the boat(s) in our lives to another woman in more heated discussions, and it’s not like I’ve been one of those guys disappearing to the shed to build or restore it for hours at a time. 

   

Personally I think we’d be better loosely grouping up into slow, medium and fast fleets and racing for line honours if we don’t intend to race properly anyway.  It would provide more meaning at the finish line and critically, throughout the activity.  I don’t actually think this degrades the racing experience over handicap racing, especially if we really are saying that every dog will have its day anyway.  I doubt for one minute it would turn dinghy sailing into an arms race - everyone’s too skint thesedays or too fecking tight when it comes to expenditure on boats.  The 90’s spate of chucking a 10-15k boat on the mortgage and barely noticing it monthly is finished.  As for channelling student finance into the coffers of Topper & Lasers’s asymmetric programme, that’s well and truly over.... certainly in the UK where most early adopters have known classes boom and bust leaving you either out of pocket, or permanently on the hunt for something new and different.  

The other major flaw in the plan is that I’m of the opinion there’s going to be a reasonably large bite-back on this data driven society we find ourselves in.  Sailing could well feature in that counter culture as what it offer - boat and nature - can be quite a cathartic break from the daily grind.  Leave eSports to the gamers, the thought that every race will turn into a GPS tracked dataset leaves me very cold.    

Data has become the norm in everyday life.  I know when asking Alexa to play a generic Amazon ‘adult alternative’ playlist a data bond will form.  This becomes a monetised value chain from me in my smart-enabled home to an artist I couldn’t even name via a large tech company and a record label taking the lion shares of the proceeds.  Ultimately I don’t really care that the ‘romance’ of buying an album of a band I follow has been lost in this process.... there are positives and negatives and I’m not a rediscoverer of vinyl like some people I know.  

However do we all really, really want sailing to go down this route where winners and losers are sorted by algorithm?  It won’t affect the ends of the fleet - the best will still be the best; the guy that capsizes five times but just about gets over the finish is still better than the chap who sailed in after the first lap.  But data granularity will affect the middles of the fleet - this is where the true battleground is, especially when you consider the top of most handicap events are industry participants and sponsored sailors anyway.  The middle is where true critical mass lies - e.g. the future and the viability of sailing as a sport.  These are where the historic bones of contention around handicapping boats stem from- we know this from experience, Merlin Rockets and Phantoms more recently - both very middle-of-the-road-ish options.