ISAF 2003 World Sailing Championships, Cadiz

“All the Olympic classes, all the emotion”

The organisers of the 2003 ISAF World Sailing Championships, Cadiz are right on track with their preparation for the largest event ever for the Olympic classes. It will be held next September and will be a real milestone as far as the organisation of sailing events is concerned.

The setting will be the Bay of Cadiz between the 11th and 25th September 2003, when the first joint World Championships of the Olympic classes in the history of Olympic Sailing will be held simultaneously.

Just as in the spring of 1992, the year when the Bay of Cadiz hosted the World and European Championships of the Olympic Classes, this race area, located in the south of Europe, will once again be the venue for such an event. Only this time, there will be an added dimension, as if the racing was stretched over three months on that occasion, all the classes will be competing simultaneously and within bay next year.

The work to organise such an event, that began in the year 2000, when the ISAF decided to award the running of this event to Mundo Vela, has speed up over recent months. Special mention should be made of the numerous races that have been held in order to try out the various race committees, measurement teams, judges, etc, who will form part of the human resources taking part in the ISAF 2003 Worlds.

The next race is the III International Carnival Race, which will be an official test event for the Worlds, from the 6th to 9th March 2003. The same race areas as in the Worlds will be used and this opportunity to test the racing conditions at first hand will therefore attract the best sailors from around the world to the Bay, which is famed for its winds and ideal sailing conditions.

The level of the competitors expected to take part is one of the reasons that the International Carnival Race has been chosen as the venue for the Spanish Cup for the Mistral (Youth and Junior), Laser Radial, Laser 4.7, 420, Europe classes and for the Andalusian Cup for the Patin a Vela class.

Just six months before the Worlds, it will be an excellent opportunity to try out all the human and material resources that will be subsequently used in the most important joint Olympic Sailing Event in the history of the sport.

As was the case during the XIX Bay of Cadiz Sailing Week in September, the III International Carnival Race will attract some of the sailors who are almost certain to represent their countries in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

The current world champions of the 49er class, Iker Martínez and Xabi Fernández from Spain, Portugal’s Joana Prats in Europe Women, or Greece’s Nikolas Kaklamanakis, who took Gold at Atlanta and is the current world championship of the Mistral Men class, are some of the sailors who have already confirmed that they will be competing in the International Carnival Race.

The personnel at the three bases, the Elcano Sailing Centre in Cadiz, Puerto Sherry in El Puerto de Santa María and the Teresa Zabell Municipal Sailing School in Rota, are involved in providing the human dynamics and in improving the bases’ infrastructure to ensure the perfect organisation of the best World Championships of the Olympic Classes that the ISAF has ever organised.

At the beginning of December, over four hundred volunteers attended a meeting organised by the Public Limited Company for Andalusian Sport (Deporte Andaluz) and the Mundo Vela Consortium, in order to outline all the details of the event, which will involve experts in the fields of protocol, racing, press, nautical supplies, measurement, etc.

A brief description of one of the bases (the Elcano Sailing Centre) is attached below. It will host the Laser class during the 2003 ISAF World Sailing Championships, Cadiz.

The Elcano Sailing Centre

Located at the entrance to the oldest city in the west, Cadiz, the Elcano Sailing Centre has been designated the operational centre and base for the sailors competing in the Laser class in the 2003 ISAF World Sailing Championships, Cadiz.

Considered as one of the best equipped sailing centres in Spain, its installations began to be used in July 1998, when the Spanish Junior Sailing Championships where held there. It has subsequently hosted numerous regional, national and international competitions. Its facilities are considered to be ideal for any type of dinghy racing. Proof of this was the high praise that this sailing centre received from the sailors and the organisational success of the Disabled Sailing World Championships.

The centre’s shore and water installations, with over 17,000 and 16,000 square metres respectively, have also become the setting for an attractive year-long programme of sailing and educational activities. The School Sailing Programme, the first of its kind in Spain and thanks to which all the schoolchildren from Cadiz regularly attend sailing courses, and the Sea Weeks are just part of the on-going activities at this centre, apart from the races that are periodically held there.

The installations are made up of various buildings. The Sailing Club houses the administrative offices, the gym, the classrooms and conference room, as well as a restaurant and coffee shop. The residential block provides accommodation for the people taking part in the various programmes, the first-aid centre, workshops and changing rooms. The dinghy park, together with the storage area for the windsurfing material and canoes, has a crane with a load of up to 4 tm. Finally, there is a huge ceremony patio, with a podium and seating for up to two thousand people.

Special mention should also be made of the 24-hour security service, together with a team, which is on duty round the clock, to help with the boats, the metrological stations, public telephone boxes and the excellent service provided by the personnel who man the Elcano Sailing Centre.