The Olympic Curse

I'll have to get a copy of your article on those fascinating trials, but at the moment I can't find anything about traps being banned. I'm going off things like David Thomas' piece in Yachting World of November 1965 where he wrote that for the first trials at Weymouth, the IYRU Class Policy and Organisation Committee recommended to the selection committee that (among other things);

"(iii) the boat should not be so extreme, particularly it (sic) that it must not have such a large sail area that it would give undue advantage to helmsmen of exceptional weight and size."

and;

"There will be no restrictions imposed on the sail area, size or design of the boats entered."

The "there shall be no restrictions imposed on (the) design" seems pretty blunt. Was the "specific ban" of the trapeze in another document, or was it inferred from part (iii) of the recommendations, which said that boats should not be too extreme?

My research on the ISAF trials centred on other areas and I've tried to cover a very wide range of space and time because I'm interested in wide trends and the inter-relationship of various national and international types and designs, as well as looking at many other classes in some detail, so I haven't done the sort of detailed interviews that you have carried out. 

When I was looking up stuff on the "Olympic curse" I did find a reference from the early '70s where ISAF's Vice President was saying that they did not want to organise sailing trials ever again, so it seems that they may have been burned too. As a general note, of course one man's "political decision" can be another man's "logical outcome", depending on the way the final choice went!

I have found a quote that brings the ISAF trials and the "Olympic curse" subject back together. When the new International singlehander was first mooted, David Thomas wrote that the Finn "lost any chance it might have had of becoming a 'popular' single-handed dinghy as soon as people began to discover the scope  of what was intended to be the simplest and least complicated rig of all. (Elvstrom developed the rig and) set an Olympian standard that few could emulate...This, in a way, was the Finn's undoing. There is now room for an International class which is not quite so demanding and in which yachtsmen can race together on an international basis without being constantly observed for their Olympic potential."