Medal Race

Surely the best way to keep the sponsors and grant authorities happy is to produce gold medals?

With the exception of Ben Ainslie (who was clearly extremely fortunate in the way his medal race unfolded) we've singularly failed to do that, when it would be reasonable to have expected probably 3 and maybe 4 golds had each race series been run in "normal" circumstances and on courses with steady breezes.

Taking the Finns as an example, the footage of the series races out in the bay with breeze and waves made a far better media spectacle than the medal race held inshore with flat water and patchy light airs. And surely the spectators the sponsors are trying to reach are the millions watching on tv, not the few thousand sat on the Nothe fort. The most memorably footage I saw of the whole regatta was the heli shots of the 470s and the footage of the Finns reaching and running in big seas.

So to my mind, if LOCOG wanted to give the spectators the best series, and the sponsors the best chance of the best sailors winning gold then they should have just held a straight ten race series out in the bay. If spectators want to go and soak up the atmosphere then set up massive screens and commentary on the Nothe and maybe even mark a channel so the sailors have to sail close inshore on their way out to and in from the course. That way they still get all the atmosphere but we don't make a farce out of the entire thing for the sake of providing a spectacle for a vanishingly  tiny minority of the viewing public.