European sailing news, 2020 Olympics, Sail-World toolbar and more

by Jedda Murphy and the Sail-World.com Team on 15 Feb 2013 Welcome to the second Sail-World European newsletter this week. Due to popular demand and the sheer number of European sailing stories we are covering Sail-World is increasing its newsletter frequency to twice weekly.

This week the final sea miles of the Vendée Globe 2012-2013 is testing De Lamotte (FRA, Initiatives Coeur) and Alessandro Di Benedetto (ITA, Team Plastique), the two skippers still at sea. Di Benedetto is in a hole and De Lamotte has one in front of him, with apparently no way round it on the passage back to Les Sables.

'My routing has me arriving on Saturday evening, I think that’s too late to go directly up the channel, so it will be Sunday morning,' De Lamotte had written, perhaps hopefully.

Alessandro Di Benedetto (ITA, Team Plastique) writes: ‘The days pass between squalls and unstable wind that runs continuously and force me to manoeuvre a lot. I often find myself to change tack four times in the same hour, send and lower the Code Zero several times in a row, just to earn a few miles.’

Also this week Eurosaf announced the launch of the Champions Sailing Cup website and publishing of the Notice of Series. Eurosaf are very excited at being able to offer sailors and sailing this new series starting this year.

Sailing seems set for 2020 Olympics at least with the Executive Board (EB) of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have included it in the 25 sports it will propose to the 125th IOC Session for approval as the core sports for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.

A shock for wresting, one of the original Olympic sports excluded from the core, it will now join seven shortlisted sports – baseball-softball, karate, roller sports, sport climbing, squash, wakeboarding and wushu - vying for inclusion in the 2020 Olympic programme as an additional sport. If Sailing does not pay attention to the need to engage with the Olympic audiences this could be its fate some time down the course.

On an international note Emirates Team NZ's first day of sailing in their new second generation AC72, Aotearoa, on a light summer's day on the Hauraki Gulf.

Before she sailed Grant Dalton said 'The temptation today is just to go out and send it straight away and get her up on the foils. Although that is the temptation, that is not the way we are going to run it today.

We are going to systematically load the boat, and take a few days to get to that stage. But it is really tempting to go out and send it and send a message. But we aren't going to do that today.'

So what do we have on the Day One Video? Foiling Kiwis of course!! As Oracle USA’s Aussie skipper Jimmy Spithill would say, ‘Onya Dalts!!’

The 18 footers World Championship 2013, the seven race JJ Gillian Trophy series, starts tomorrow on Sydney Harbour in Australia with a big fleet of 31 boats, including the biggest contingent of Kiwis in many years, as well as British and US crews.

Sail-World´s coverage of this year's event, will be more detailed than ever, we will have four video cameras on one boat in the fleet, just to add another perspective.

And finally Sail-World has launched a customised tool bar aimed at serious sailors in Europe. It provides breaking news, Twitter and RSS feeds, Facebook link, enables fast searches and has a handy drop down for a whole range of Sail-world key elements. So to keep up with what is happening on the European sailing scene and internationally install this toolbar now.

Install the Sail-World Europe toolbar here.