Nice compromise

Double Olympic medallist Ian Walker examines ISAF's revised Olympic racing format

After a year of quite extreme experimentation ISAF finally settled on a relatively conservative change to the Olympic racing format. It is to Goren Petersson’s credit that the President’s submission was accepted with relatively minor amendments. With only two nations opposing the submission, ISAF have hopefully done enough to show that sailing is prepared to modernise and adapt to the demands of the media while fundamentally not changing the game too much. The key elements of the submission are:

Format
- An 11 race series (a 16 race series for the 49er).
- Last day medal race for the top 10.
- All boats advancing will be required to compete in the Medal Race.
- On the water umpiring will be used in the Medal Race.

Scoring System
- Competitors will carry their series score through to the Medal Race.
- Medal Race points will be doubled and added to the series score.
- If the Medal Race is not completed, medals will be awarded based on the series score for all the prior races (in the normal way).

This is the same format that the RYA have used for their 49er RYA Gold Series for the last 4 years.

The key advantages are:
- It forces the medal winners to sail the last race (theoretically you could have secured Gold by being 20 points ahead but this was not the case in any class in Athens).
- Because they cannot discard the last race themselves it makes it less likely that someone will sail another boat out of the last race (a la Ainslie in Sydney). Note that this could well happen in race 10 now!
- The last race will have more of an effect on the medals-maintaining interest, but not so much that a very sketchy race will skew the results.
- The last race before the medal race should be more exciting with people scrambling to make the top 10.

Key concerns
- As is so often the case the devil is in the detail and much of the detail has not been finalised yet. In particular how close to the shore will the medal race be? How long will the race / course be? What wind conditions will be acceptable? ISAF are going to be the sole decision makers on whether conditions are suitable to race but how much pressure will they be under from the TV and media?
- There is a far greater likelihood that the medals will be decided by the officials. This will especially be the case in classes that have lots of issues with rule 42. Yellow flag penalties and in particular carrying forward previous offences may need to be reviewed. While the benefits of having no protests are clear, my experience is that even in big slow turning boats like America’s Cup boats and with the best umpires in the world, on the water judging in fleet racing is rarely satisfactory. Who would want the responsibility of being an umpire with Olympic medals at stake? ISAF must make sure they select the best officials based on ability and not ‘fairness’ or ‘geographical spread’. These officials will need to be class specific and highly trained.
- The last race of the Olympics is a special case. In my experience those people who have no chance of getting in the medals (it could be half the 10 boat fleet) do not try their hardest or are so hungover that they cannot! Worse than that it could be that they influence the overall results more in this system. In recent years we have even seen boats giving up their race position to let their friends or training partners win a medal. This is in practice very hard to prove and could be made worse by double points and everyone having time think about the permutations.

Prior to the ISAF conference I was scared at the scale of change that could have been forced on the sport. The key thing to me is that the Olympics should remain the truest test of sporting excellence. I feel that under this system the best man / woman / team should still win. That has not been the case in other scoring systems and formats trialled by ISAF over the last year. Sailing should not be decided by one race as the real skill is in putting a series of top scores together across a range of races and conditions. Unlike any other sport you can be directly affected by your competitors and other random elements that can only be averaged out over a series of races. To have gone for a winner takes all final race would have degraded the title of ‘Olympic Champion’.

Assuming the detail is ironed out to maintain the quality of racing and the officials, race officers and on the water judges are trained to highest possible standard these changes look OK. A straw pole of eight Olympians here at +39 Challenge in Valencia also showed relief at the changes and general support of the attempt to move the sport forward.

I guess the real issue therefore is whether the changes go far enough to satisfy the media and in particular the TV. Time will tell.

When you study the weather data from Qingdao it is pretty clear that the main issue is not going to be the format but how much racing there will actually be and whether that racing is worth watching on TV. Racing is statistically only likely on less than half the available days during the Olympic period so if I was ISAF I would be working on making the schedule as flexible as possible rather than concentrating too much of making a spectacle of the last day.