America's Cup, Sailor of the Year, ISAF and more

by Rob Kothe on 29 Oct 2014 Spithill and Slingsby, Outteridge and Goodison, some great talent is assembling ahead of the 2017 America's Cup.

Talked briefly to Jimmy Spithill yesterday before he caught the red eye from LA to New York ahead of a flight to Mallorca for the Rolex Sailor of the Year Awards next Tuesday.

It will be interesting to see how the Team USA nine-zip winning streak in San Francisco last September rates against the Olympic classes dominated by the talents of Giles Scott, Burling and Tuke and Belcher and Ryan.

Been through the Agenda of the ISAF Annual Meeting, it’s pretty much standard stuff except for 25.14:

25- 14 ISAF Classification Code Appendix 4, Regulation 22

The Executive Committee is of the opinion ISAF should discontinue providing the service of classification for sailors.

There is a pretty widespread feeling in the sailing community that ISAF does not care about anything other than Olympic sailing.

Waiting to hear a convincing explanation, but to me it seems this is a good service that helps Corinthian and semi-Corinthian events worldwide.

100,000 sailors from 216 countries are using this web-based system.

Most of the hard work has been done and to throw all the good work done over the last 20 years and replace it with what??

The ISAF Executive’s suggestion that classes and events do this ignores the reason for success of this system, its uniformity in use across all classes and events.

As one commentator said, 'The problem is when you see decision making like this... you wonder just what our leaders are smoking! Maybe the same stuff they were on when they threw out the multihull for 2012?'

Lots of interesting news today from Oz and the World.