ISAF Olympic Commission Chair airs his views

Phil Jones talks through some of the key aspects of The Report

Following the publication of the ISAF Olympic Commission recommendations for how to ensure the future of sailing as an Olympic sport (read more about this here), Chair of the Commission, Phil Jones, who’s day job is as Chief Executive of Yachting Australia, explained a little more to thedailysail about the report.

thedailysail: So your report is published. What happens now?

Phil Jones: ISAF have invited responses to it by 17 June and I guess they are mainly going to come from ISAF Member National Authorities and class associations. They have also set up an email address where people can contribute directly to it. I had a look at a few of those - in these circumstances you can normally expect a whole bunch of abuse and not much else, but it’s been pretty positive. Then the Executive Committee meet on 5-6 July and they are going to give some thought to their response and the implementation of the recommendations with the idea that in November, Council will be invited to endorse the general direction and then vote on some of the specific changes that need making in order to implement it.

tds: So still a long way off?

PJ: Yes, but in ISAF terms that’s short! To be fair, the approach we’ve taken is that we want to give people the opportunity to consider it and come up with a plan that people are comfortable taking forward. One of the problems we have within ISAF is that this submission-based system means you get stuff coming from left field which often means its isn’t to a cohesive plan, it is just an MNA’s latest idea. In setting out to do this we wanted to give ourselves a blue print to move forwards with; a work plan that we can get into. But it needs that time for people to really give it some consideration.

tds: So who will vote on it within ISAF?

PJ: Eventually as always happens in ISAF it will be the people around the Council table. We deliberately presented it to that group in May so they are now part of that process. The council is made up of groups of MNAs but they will have the opportunity to contribute to it through the process which is in place. It will be interesting because there is a fair amount of change from where we are now to where we want to get to.

tds: Where in your opinion will be the biggest disputes?

PJ: I think the biggest change is probably to the event structure and the way the major events are managed to be honest. What we are recommending in there, is that ISAF need to take a more commercial approach to those events than they have in the past and that really needs a separate organisation to be established to take that forward. So that is a fairly major shift.

I am not sure it will be controversial, but the other thing we are recommending - and almost everyone you speak to say “you have got to do that” - is the question of the time frame and the decision making process for the Olympic events. Clearly you can’t make a decision four years before the Olympics that you are going to change boats. You can do it for the elite group that is just going to change from the Yngling into women’s match racing or whatever it might be, but the impact that that has on other events like region games and the programs MNA develop in support of their Olympic athletes and the impact it has on developing athletes, who are probably already started on the pathway. For most Olympic athletes now it is a six to eight year campaign. I guess that was highlighted by the Tornado decision - people were down a route and suddenly because of the specific skills required, had nowhere else to go. There is not much argument with that, although I’m sure there will be some argument about exactly how to do that. At present we rae one of the only Olympic sports that throws the whole thing up in the air every four years and waits for it to come down and land.

tds: You need a rolling program to upgrade the equipment?

PJ: We are suggesting that in a normal cycle, this November we would be making decisions about the Olympic events in 2016 and 2020 - not necessarily the equipment, but certainly a decision like ‘we are going to have a men’s singlehander’ as an obvious one! And you’d make that decision as a core event on the basis that you knew you were going to have it in 2016 and 2020. Then in 2014 you’d consider that again and potentially extend it out to 2024, so you have a 10 year time frame knowing that that event is going to be in the Olympics. You haven’t got a 14 year old swimming wondering if the 100m is going to be an event in swimming in 2016. We need to have a longer time frame and a longer vision.

tds: Given that it appears to be essential to develop the emerging nations, there is a worry that that might conflict with the sporting aspect of Olympic sailing?

PJ: Yes, and that’s why ISAF was labouring under the view that the important thing was the number of nations you actually have at the Olympic Games and in fact that isn’t the case - it is actually the number of nations you have in the qualification system. The issue in relation to the emerging nations is to engage them in that qualification process. It is not dissimilar to something like the Soccer World Cup, where they have 205 nations in their qualification system, but only end up with the last 32 at the competition itself. So it is more a question of seeing it in its broader context as the pinnacle of the qualification system, rather than the event itself.

The question of one per nation exercised us quite a bit. There is some argument for it. In the classes where you get less participation - which tend to be the more technically-based ones like the Star and the Finn to some extent - there is justification for one per nation. One of the arguments against is the opportunity for team racing - given what hangs on the competition. Indeed we saw it to some extent in Qingdao in the medal races, particularly where you have only got 10 boats. There were a couple of times when the guy in second was in the worst position because they got raced out of the game. If you have multiple entries per nations, the opportunity for one of your compatriots to sail someone down the fleet is significant.

tds: You are also looking to change/rationalise the World Championship structure so that they don’t happen every year?

PJ: That is right – basically when you look around all the Olympic sports, the idea of having a different world championship for different events in different places at different times doesn’t really work. As I think is beginning to emerge clearly from the interest in the ISAF World Championships that have happened to date, bringing World Championships together has far more value as a combined event than as individual ones from a profile point of view and also from an MNA point of view - is the feedback we have got. For MNAs supporting their athletes, it is more effective to do that at an all-Olympic classes environment than it is to take people to different world championships in different classes in different places. In the report the conclusion we reached is that with Olympic sailing, when we are offering World titles, it ought to be when all the Olympic events are taking place in one place at one time.

tds: So how about combined ISAF World Championships every year?

PJ: The real issue with the ISAF World Championships, is that there are not that many venues in the world, given the size and scope of the event, where you can hold it. Again looking around the world in terms of how those are practised in others sports it is interesting that the frequency of world championships generally is less than annual. Some sports have them every two years, but we think that the World Cup is a better solution, bearing in mind what we need to achieve in Olympic sailing.

With the World Cup, while you are taking the top 20 sailors in each Olympic event, you have the option to take a maximum of three from each nation, so you do there address this question of having more from one nation in each event. And that allows us to test whether eventually changing the Olympic format would be sensible in terms of multiple entries per nation. The complication is that you are limited to 380 athletes across 10 events and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out that that means 38 sailors in each fleet. And then of course you have the question of how many singlehanded and doublehanded events you have, start to impact on that. The more singlehanded events you have the more nations you can include.

tds: Within the Olympic classes there seem to be two different types – the mass popularity ones like the Laser and RS:X and then you have the more elite classes like the Finn and the Star? There is no policy about that?

PJ: That is something that was discussed. The general objective is that there are a number of criteria in the [IOC] report that we need to meet. As examples - the equipment needs to be inexpensive, widely available around the world, has youth appeal, allows us to deal with a range of weights, sizes and different sorts of sailing skills, etc. Those criteria really should apply to ALL the Olympic equipment.

tds: Then that eliminates the Star, Finn and Tornado in their present form?

PJ: If you talk about a keelboat for example, you’d want the keelboat to meet those criteria in terms of it being inexpensive and widely available. And then you extend that to the Star and you think that the difficulty with boats like that is how many boats are realistically going to be competitive? You can take the view that you could leave some of the events where you don’t meet those criteria, but the Commission’s approach was – setting aside the politics and what we have got at the moment, starting with a clean piece of paper, you’d choose all the events to meet those criteria because those are actually what all the signals coming out of the IOC suggest we need to achieve.

Clearly for our sport, cost in terms of TV production and in terms of staging the event and equipment – that is something the IOC identified ten years ago - they are all issues we need to address. So questions about the type of equipment and its availability - and not only its cost in capital terms, but its development costs even more so...

tds: Surely you get round that by just going one design?

PJ: You do – exactly. We are suggesting in there that what we ought to be looking for is out of the box one design equipment, and ideally equipment that could be supplied at the Olympics. It is that type of equipment that is most appropriate. If you look at the IOC motto – ‘stronger, higher, faster’ - it is obviously about human performance, so the more we can remove equipment differences I think the better off we will be in terms of meeting the IOC’s criteria.

tds: But they have to be proper one designs?

PJ: Yes, that is indeed the challenge. If they are going to be one designs they have to be completely one design. I won’t name any classes but there are plenty where you go along the shelf and get the one you are looking for.

tds: Reading your report and what it is saying about increasing popularity and television appeal – surely one solution would be to include the foiling Moth?

PJ: I think nothing is off the table. There is no doubt that obviously you can make changes like that to improve spectator appeal. One of the discussions is how much do we need to do what are doing better or how much do we need to change what are doing to have more appeal. I suspect there is a balance in there somewhere between those two things. The challenge that the Olympics has and I actually think that sailing generally has got is how to build the fan base for sailing. Even with the America’s Cup and the profile it has and the other things that we do, we haven’t really got a fan base outside of the sailing community. That is somehow an objective of ISAF in relation to the Olympics, but I think it is an objective beyond the Olympics. Somehow we need to get to a point where there is an audience of educated non-sailors who are exposed to sailing on a regular basis. All those tools are there for us to achieve that.

So you could put foiler Moths in the Olympics and make them sail around the course backwards, but if you are not exposing the sport regularly for the 206 weeks outside of the Olympic Games, you are still not going to get big audiences watching it, because they have not got any understanding or association with it. It would help, but it won’t give us the quantum step forward, which is why we spent a fair amount of time in the report dealing with things outside of the Olympics, in terms of the event structure because those are the things that are going to make the difference in the long term in terms of gaining interest and audience.

tds: Your report has to go through a discussion process and ultimately before Council. What guarantees are that it is going to get through?

PJ: I am pretty confident that there will be change. After we presented this, one of the questions that the President asked the Council was ‘is there anybody who thinks that doing nothing is an option for us?’ And no one was of that view, so I think that is a good starting point. If you take universality and spread of the sport globally, to make it more popular and have an audience - those are things that as an international sport we’d like to achieve generally. In terms of what the IOC are looking for – do we look at any of these things and think ‘no, we don’t want that’. If you work through them they are all things you want, so it is more a question of deciding what the priorities are.
“In terms of our TV audience, if out of the 26 sports we were about halfway [rather than at the bottom], we would feel more comfortable in terms of our spread, because no one of these criteria was going to make or break us. That is why we have taken the approach of analysing what the IOC, as the key partner in this, are looking for. The wording is pretty clear: They are looking at the strengths and weaknesses of sports and what value they add to the Olympic program. When you see us last in terms of audience figures and the sixth most expensive to produce [TV] and worth 0.1 % of ticket sales, then ask what value you add, you certainly have some challenges.

The good thing is that people recognise that. I would be very surprised if this got left on the shelf. How quickly the decisions get made, that is a Council and Executive decision. The sense was in Hungary [at the recent ISAF meeting] that we should move this forward as quickly as we reasonably can. But we need to be careful we get it right.

The key thing is to find a plan that everyone understands and buys into. This work isn’t ever going to be finished. We are constantly going to have to review this. This is only the starting point.