Will the new Olympic Commission have teeth?

We speak to its newly appointed chairman, Yachting Australia's Phil Jones

Yachting Australia’s Rod Carr-equivalent, CEO Phil Jones, a Brit who has been living down under for 12 years, a few months back made the mistake of sticking his head above the parapet and since an ISAF Committee meet in February now finds himself chairing the ISAF’s new Olympic Commission, tasked with defining what their policy on the Olympic Games should be.

The role of the Olympic Commission is possibly valuable and certainly well intentioned but the question is - will it make a difference to the outcome of current or future Olympic debates? On the one hand there is clearly a problem with the decision making process within ISAF, as demonstrated by the equipment decisions for the Olympic Games that regularly bites them - of somehow all the advice the Council receives from its numerous sub-committees being ignored come voting time, it even going against previous strategy it has decided upon. On the other hand while choice of equipment is of profound interest to those involved, it detracts from many other aspects of ‘how to make sailing a better Olympic sport’ that should be receiving more attention.

Jones has been asked to take up new role following his strong submission to ISAF prior to their last General Meeting in November 2008. “Our submission was really driven by the decision on the multihull and generally the way the Olympic decisions were made in 2007,” he says. “Really I suppose it was due to the lack of any clear policy, obviously in this case in relation to equipment and events, but just generally about where the Olympics were moving - very much subject to the latest view at the time as opposed to having any strategic, longer term view of things. So that is really what drove the submission. Interestingly it got a pretty positive reception at the ISAF meeting. Everyone was feeling frustrated by the way the process seemed to be working, so here we are.”

Also sitting on the Committee is Chris Atkins, Chairman of the Events Committee (on which Jones also sits), 470 Silver medallist Marcelien De Koning who heads the Athletes’ Commission, American Cory Sertl, a member of Council and who has previously been involved in various groups before looking at the Olympics and events strategy, Austria’s Georg Fundak, Chairman of the Coaches Commission and Uruguay’s Scott Perry, Chairman of the Regional Games Committee. They are supported by Alastair Fox from ISAF’s permanent executive.

“One of the reasons for the submission in the first place was that there are all those groups that have some kind of impact in the way ISAF approaches the Olympics, but there is no overarching view that pools that all together. So the classic was in 2005, when we had one part of ISAF say to the IOC ‘we are going to make the sport in the Olympics more exciting by introducing faster more exciting equipment’. And yet two years later you are totally out of the multihull and you don’t put in a women’s high performance skiff. So you think if that was the strategy two years ago what has changed that would make us do something different? And it was just a case of the dots not being joined up.”

However there are other issues than just the boats: “ISAF tends to concentrate on the things that the people within the ISAF committees are most comfortable with: they talk a lot about equipment and events and the format of the regatta. The things that really matter tend to get lost in the discussion because they are not areas where ISAF has expertise, things like event presentation, television production and consistency of approach, even the presentation of the medal race. To me the medal race is probably a good initiative, but hasn’t been well thought through in terms of ‘okay, it is all very well saying let’s reduce the fleet in the case of the Stars from 17 boats to 10 for the medal race, but what are you going to do to enhance the coverage, so that people understand the story?’

“The point is that there are a whole lot of other issues that surround the Olympic regatta, because whatever boats you put in there, if you are not covering it properly, you are never going to make much progress. If you are not explaining the event in a meaningful way, you are pushing it uphill before you start. So while our group will look at the question of equipment and the events, it is really going to be more about strategy, how we are going to develop the sport in the Olympics, what are we trying to portray and how are we going cover that more effectively.”

So the plan is for the Olympics Commission to come up a strategy that is hopefully set in concrete, that will enable them to plan for the future and hopefully not allow ISAF to be sidetracked into making bad decisions about this ever again.

It may also reduce some of the time wasting, for at the moment with 130 nations as members of ISAF and with almost as many differing opinions on the shape of Olympic sailing, there are a large number of submissions that they receive that at present they have to consider.

Jones envisages the following: “There is a group that sits there and when a submission comes forward, it says to a committee or to council: ‘this submission isn’t consistent with the strategy that we’ve all agreed because…’ At the moment that is not happening. So if we rewound to November 2007, I would like to think that someone would have said, ‘hang on, in 2005 we said we were going to improve the sport in the Olympics by introducing fast and more exciting boats and we are now about to take a vote that could mean that we are going to remove the multihull. So let us stop and take a deep breath before we move on with that’. That issue was never part of the debate when the vote on the multihull was taken. I keep focussing on that example because that highlights some of the issues that surround this.”

Although it is covering old ground the decisions to be made over the equipment for the Games does end up being an exercise in trying to keep everyone happy and often there are sharp conflicts. For example on the one hand the IOC are trying to reduce the overall number of athletes but on the other want to increase the number of nations competing. Is the Olympics only an event for youth sailors or should it cater for older athletes and if so to what degree do you want to do this? This leads to a debate over dinghies versus keelboats. And so it goes on...

“Everywhere you look there are issues that I’m hoping we at least get to address in the strategy and have a sensible debate about because otherwise we will keep lurching from crisis to crisis,” says Jones.

However at the end of the day, the Olympic Commission could be in the situation where, like so many of the other of ISAF’s sub-committees they put a lot of work into making their recommendations, only for them to be ignored when it comes to the final vote within the main council, when other political issues come to the fore such as the chances a particular country/Member National Authority have to do well in a certain class or even what equipment they have most recently invested in. Effectively it has proved to be democracy at its worst.

“I think inevitably in this organisation it is about the strength and research of the argument,” says Jones when we ask how this might be resolved. “I think the difference is that if you are looking at immediate decisions, change is much more difficult. If you look at a seven or eight year time span as opposed to a three or four year time span, I think you can take a more strategic view and I think we have to have that process in place. The Olympic Commission doesn’t change the structure of ISAF or change the decision making processes. It is not a group of three or four people who are going to make executive decisions about sailing in the Games. And I’m not sure that would work either. We can only do this by looking at what we want to achieve and making decisions that are consistent with that. And ISAF have never had that discussion in relation to the Olympic Games. And so much small boat sailing around the world is so strongly influenced by Olympic decisions, so to not at least have a plan in place is really difficult.
"Things like the discussion that took place last November about whether the 470 should be swapped for a twin trapeze high performance dinghy - the problem is that the decision was less than four years out before the next Olympics - one issue, but one of the key things it turned on was that events like the Asian Games have already agreed that in 2010 they are going to use the 470. So all those countries have invested in the 470 as equipment for the Asian Games and they are not going to then go back and start sailing the 29XX or whatever the chosen equipment might be in two years time. So you have got to take a longer term view on some of those decisions, because our experience is that people are starting Olympic campaigns six, seven, eight years before.”

Jones also admits that it might be time for a restructuring of ISAF’s voting procedure.
“There are two things you could do. One is that the whole organisation needs to be completely restructured and I think that there is a bit of an appetite for that. That wasn’t somewhere we felt that we necessarily needed to go at that point. I think there is already a ground swell and there is already an understanding that it is just too unwieldy and the decision making processes are just too convoluted.”

For ISAF of course their focus is so much on the Olympics, rather than other spheres of yachting, because it represents the major slice of their business. Jones estimates “at least $500 million every four years in terms of income into sailing from governments and other organisations - and that’s conservative we think, or nearly 80% of ISAF’s income is based on our success as a sport in the Olympics and maintaining our position in the Olympics. You look at where we are in the television ladder and live audience and all those numbers, and rugby and golf, there are any number of other major international federations saying ‘we want to be in there’. And not only are they are saying that, they will be in there almost at any price. ‘Tell us what compromises you want us to make to our sport and we’ll make them to get into the Olympic Games? So we are in a competitive environment and we didn’t feel we could just wait until ISAF - if it decides to - goes through a complete reorganisation. Our group is going to look at the overall perspective and try and make some step changes rather than just leave it as it is and go through what we are going through now in four years time or eight years time and so on.”

So, we have to ask, what hardware would Jones like to see at the Games? “I don’t have very strong views on it. There have been a number of proposals that talk about the 5-5 slate. At the moment we have got ten events so the argument is let’s have five mens’ events and five womens’ and on the face of it that is not a bad starting point. But then when you get down to ‘okay, what might those be?’ The proposals so far have said ‘we should have a board, a singlehanded dinghy, a doublehanded dinghy, a multihull and a keel boat’. You look at that on the men’s side and you think ‘okay, we could probably make that work’, but then when you look at it on the women’s side I’m not sure at the moment for example how many multihull women’s crews you’d get. If you did that then certainly you’d drive women’s crews into multihulls, there is no doubt about it.

“So then the question is the equipment we use - should we be trying to reflect what is happening in sailing or should we be trying to lead in terms of those decisions? I think that is more the fundamental. It would be great, some would argue, to see a foiler Moth in the Games or a foiler of some sort and if you took the 5-5 view that would be pretty difficult, because you limit the options for new development. So I think there is quite a discussion. I could see a 4-4 approach working and leave yourself with two things where you might do some different things.

"It is interesting this question about whether faster boats make it more exciting. If you look at the ISAF Olympic video, what is interesting about that to me, is that if you look at the Star race or the Finn race in the pictures you have probably got at any time seven or eight boats in the shot because they are slower boats so the separation between them is never that great. If you look at the Tornados or 49ers racing, you generally only see a boat or two in the shot, because of the separation the boats establish quickly. So what is better television is a question we need to look at. I think both have their place. I don’t think it is only about putting the fastest boats we can find in the Olympics because that is going to make the best television. You have got to think about what the balance is in this and what is the story we are trying to tell.

"So I don’t have a very strong view. I think we need to find a balance in terms of what we are portraying and clearly then we have got issues of catering for a range of weights of athletes, because in our sport we can do that with 10 events. And then there is a question of are we looking for younger athletes or are we trying to allow athletes as they get older to sail in other events which extends their athletic life. But if you are going to do all those things you wind up with inherently more conflicts because you are trying to squeeze so much into 10 events and that is a difficult balance.

“The key thing is that we need to define what we are trying to achieve using those ten events. I think then the decision becomes that much easier. But there is so much vested interest in the equipment and the event decisions and when you consider the time and energy that is spent on that one decision, when there are so many other more important areas we should be focussing on to really portray the sport well in the games, it is just unfortunate that is one that keeps bogging everyone down. We could use the classes we’ve got and if we covered it properly we could do ourselves an enormous amount of good”

Eons ago Jones ran the Ultra 30 circuit in the UK, which was more the made-for-television style racing that Olympic sailing needs to err towards and has already done with the medal race. “In Qingdao, I know ISAF won an award for the television programme, but honestly it was so difficult to understand. What it needed was the box in the top RH corner at each mark [on the TV], showing that if the race stays like this the bloke in the fourth place is the gold medallist, but if he gets overtaken - which in a couple of the races it was all pretty close, particularly in the top four places. What we portrayed there in terms of the contest was just not where we need to be I don’t think. When you look at some of the stuff which came out of the last America’s Cup, you always see it from one side of the course, so they are not cutting across the line and you always see them tracking perpendicular to the breeze so you can get a flavour of which boat is in front and the graphics are reasonably sophisticated to show all those things. I think it is that kind of stuff that we can bring to small boat sailing and make it really interesting for the audience. To focus our effort and get some people who have had some experience of that and work with them to build the strategy of building the TV protocols, that is what I hope this group will do.”

To this end Jones hopes to bring in consultants to help their process and this is likely to include his old Ultra 30 mate Andrew Preece of APP Sunset & Vine. It will also include the company BeTomorrow to run the real time graphics while ISAF themselves are looking at boat tracking systems.

“We are in quite an unusual position over the next few years because we have got the Olympics in the UK and I know that the RYA have done a fair amount of work on some of this already, but we have also got the 2011 Worlds in Perth, so we have a lot of opportunities to develop this. I think one of the things that I’m sure we’ll be recommending is that ISAF use a consistent [TV production/graphics] team through the test event in 2011 and the Olympics in 2012 and they recommend that team to the IOC. The issue in China was that the producer hadn’t been involved in sailing that much. So we need to ensure that we have got people who understand the sport directing the coverage. It would be nice to go further that and extend that into the World Cup that they are trying to breath life into at the moment. If we start covering this consistently we have actually got half a chance to get people who don’t sail to understand what we are trying to do.

“One of the key things about the Olympics is that it is the one small boat every four years, where while we are constrained by budget, there is a lot spent on it. I think therefore we need to plan it better to make sure that when we are spending that money we are really getting a good product.”

The Olympic Commission is fresh out of the box and with its members dotted around the world, Skype conference calls are going to come in handy for initial meetings before they hook up in person at ISAF’s Mid-Year meet in Poland in May. In terms of a time frame Jones says he will use that opportunity to meet people and have a period of consultant with different groups and individuals before the commission gets a draft out in September prior to the next main ISAF meeting in November.

“Obviously from a consultation point of view, ISAF have got a structure that will send it out to the MNAs, but I’m quite keen that we try to get feedback from the broader sailing community, because the MNAs – I know because I am one! - tend to be a bit conservative and change isn’t necessarily something they are keen to see because there is a lot of investment in particular classes or they see a class being particularly in their favour in terms of one being picked for the Games over something else. Sailors are not slow in coming forward to say what they thing, so we are just trying to work out how to manage that – I am thinking we will put some sort of draft up and invite people to comment against that draft perhaps in some kind of discussion forum that our group might moderate.”

So what do we think about all this?

If the Olympic Commission is the way to ensure that there is a safeguard within ISAF that prevents it from making the wrong decisions in the future, then we say bring it on. However particularly when it comes to the gear, this has been so written about and so heavily discussed in the past that surely it is not rocket science to come to a conclusion of what the best boats would be?

If the objectives are:

- making competition as international as possible
- putting on a good show for the TV
- complying with the IOC requirement for male:female competitors
- ensuring blokes of different weights are catered for
- ensuring sailors of different ages are catered for
- the Olympic classes represent the latest in our sport (ie include some high performance boats)

Then with 10 boat format should look like this:

Laser - men
Laser Radial - women
Finn - men
49er - men
29erXX - women
Star - men
Multihull – one design Tornado - mixed
Moth – Bladerider - mixed
RSXX Men
RSXX Women

Or if an extra class is allowed:
Laser - men
Laser Radial - women
Star
49er - men
29erXX - women
Eliot 6 – men’s match racing
Eliot 6 – women’s match racing
Multihull – one design Tornado - mixed
Moth – Bladerider - mixed
RSXX Men
RSXX Women

Our reasoning: The Lasers and RS:Xes are in because they are relatively cheap and internationally plentiful, thereby attracting the most number of competitors and nations including out of the way places such as Belarus, Monrovia and the Cayman Islands.

At the other end of the spectrum the Tornado and Moth are in because they represent the state of the art in our sport (despite the Tornado being more than 30 years old). Few classes outside of ORMA 60 trimarans can get the non-sailing public to stop in its tracks, but the air-borne foiling Moth is absolutely one and there are more than enough people sailing these internationally now to make it a legitimate Olympic class.

While the IOC seem keen not to mix men and women’s competition, one of the unique features of sailing is that there are some instances when women can be competitive against men, and if modern society genuinely wishes more equality between the sexes, then surely mixed classes should be not just encouraged, but fought for? So we have the mixed classes as being the Moth and the Tornado.

In the 11 class format we have introduced the Elliott 6 for match racing, but for both men and women as it is ridiculous to not have both sexes match racing. Having match racing in the event is important because it is dipictive of the America’s Cup which is the biggest event in sailing bar none.

The 49er and 29erXX are in for the very reason that the 470s are out: They are state of the art boats while both the 470 looks like it was designed in the 1950s (in fact it was designed in the 1960s). Those wishing to sail two up can go to the 49er or 29erXX, while big lads who might once have been in the Finn (in our 11 boat format) can go match race or sail a Star.

The Star is in because it allows older sailors, the John Danes of this world, to compete, but equally there are some 40 year olds who sail the Tornado and it may also be possible for older, if slightly lighter sailors to be competitive in the Moth.

Fast boats do make good television, it is just harder to achieve.

Vindictive Ainslie v Scheidt style match racing in the medal races is a good thing and should be encouraged. It just needs more explanation.

Any other views to us here