What Olympic Class has too go

Now cat sailing isn't an Olympic sport, we should see a huge surge in popularity? After all, it has often been said that being in the Olympics kills a class - does the same hold true for a whole section of the sport? Or will we suddenly see Women's match racing at every club across the land?

Originally posted by Chris 249 Yes, and compared to every other country, the British have "too many classes", including many of the minor local classes that many people in other countries would like to kill. You guys also seem to have many slow (or slowish) boats as well as many fast ones; you often sail on (to use an American's term) "damp sponges"; and your fleet tends to include lots of small boats. Oh, and mixed fleet racing. And it all works incredibly well. Many things would only work because of the UK's geography, but the huge success of dinghy sailing in the UK seems to prove that many of the things that people traditionally think are important (concentration into a few classes, lots of big fast boats sailing on open waters, concentration on class racing) are complete rubbish. What a pity the ISAF doesn't seem to want to look at the proven success of dinghy sailing in the UK and try to learn from it.

Yes, according to the accepted wisdom the UK sailing scene should be a 'basket case'....

Certainly part of it is down to geography - though it wouldn't be much different for most other european countries - however trying to support a country wide open circuit in somewhere the size of the US or Aus...!

I suspect it's also down to the more intangible things - that really competitive sailing is less about finding out who's best and more a good background for people to socialise, which is perhaps a healthier approach.  Certainly the socials seem to have higher prominence in the UK - the 'quick meal and the everybody goes home after an hour' was something of a shock at the french events I've attended...

The number of classes allows lots of people to have a day on the podium (and the Endeavour results would infer that the standard of sailing is quite consistent across the top of the range of classes) which has a feelgood factor that being just another number on a huge ranking list doesn't.

The other thing I wonder is if the classes are more representative of an optimum size for a social group (bit of cod anthropology here...).  That forcing everybody into one or two huge classes makes everything too impersonal??

I don't think we have all the answers - sailing is certainly diminishing in the UK, but it would be interesting to know whether it's at a slower rate to countries that run a stricter system.

Petition to the IOC

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/multihullinolympics/index .html