Drop the discards?

That seems to be the idea coming from 49er and Nacra class manager Ben Remocker. 

It's an interesting question. Assuming you are not talking about club series which span several weeks and non-attendance is therefore inevitable, I think the use of discards is somewhat a legacy of ye olde days. There are many other sports where a bit of bad luck can spoil your result - Formula 1, Premier League, Test Match cricket – but you can't discard your worst race, match or innings. In any case if the series is long enough your luck should average out, and serious gear failure is unusual these days (and most likely due to poor care than bad luck). So in that sense I see no need for a discard at all in a weekend open or week long championship. On the other hand, having no discards encourages a conservative strategy, whereas a high percentage of discards encourages risk taking – hit the corner and you may win or lose, but you can discard the loss and bank the win.

So I would suggest that at the Olympics the different classes should have a different discard policy as that way they actually become different events (with different strategic approaches to racing) rather than the same event conducted in different classes.

However I prefer the format suggested by Andy Rice in this month's Y&Y mag, where the medal event is the first to two race wins, with the winner of the qualifying series counting one race win at the start. That way the gold medallist is always the person to win the last race, which again encourages positive sailing and makes intuitive sense to the audience.

Originally posted by A2Z However I prefer the format suggested by Andy Rice in this month's Y&Y mag, where the medal event is the first to two race wins, with the winner of the qualifying series counting one race win at the start. That way the gold medallist is always the person to win the last race, which again encourages positive sailing and makes intuitive sense to the audience.

All of these ideas seem unnecessarily complicated, why not use the F1 scoring system with points for the first 10 places, easy for the general public to understand?

If you don't have a discard in "amateur" racing, you'll probably have a lot more requests for redress. Many times it seems that when you're mired in mid pack and having a bad race, you get slowed down by people who don't know the rules. If you're going to drop the race anyway and therefore it doesn't matter if you finish 15th or 20th, it's no big deal and you don't make an issue of it. If, on the other hand, you had to count every race those five points may prove critical. Therefore you'll probably quite often end up with a top contender protesting some mid-fleeter or a back-of-the-fleet sailor who was having a better than usual race. That doesn't sound like a really good recipe for fleet harmony. It's also very hard to see how a race committee could work out what adjustment to apply if one of the potential winners wins a redress request after being hit at a mark rounding when they are buried 25 boats back on the first lap. 

Edited by Chris 249 - 24 Aug 18 at 3:12am