September 16 - Paralympics..Surprise World Sailing move..Pope to stand

by . on 16 Sep 2016 Welcome to Sail-World.com's New Zealand e-magazine for September 16, 2016

Much of the content in this edition features the Sailing events at the 2016 Paralympics.

This could well be the last time sailing will be featured at the Paralympics with the sport being struck off the slate for the Tokyo 2020 event.

Quite whether World sailing can recover that position for 2024 remains to be seen.

The images from the regatta now underway are just excellent, and photographer Richard Langdon shows us that Paralympic Sailing is just as physically challenging as able-bodied sailing.

New Zealand has only one crew competing in the three man Sonar keelboat. We did qualify in the other two events - single and double handed keelboats but elected not to send crews, so the New Zealand places have gone to lesser ranked countries.

Quite what the future of the sport will be remains to be seen. It is easy to postulate that the sport will be back for the 2024 Paralympics, but there is no guarantee of that happening.

An interesting aspect of this weeks regatta is that two skippers are competing who are well known on the America's Cup scene are competing.

While some were quick to criticise the entry of twice America's Cup champion Rick Dodson, as being too good for the Paralympic fleet, the fact is that he is not winning and has a real struggle just to medal.

That would tend to indicate that the standard of the racing in the Paralympic fleet is way higher than many give it credit.

The fact that these sailors are disabled in various ways doesn't mean that they are less skilled. The boats have been adapted to be sailed by people who are not as physically capable of grunting their boat through a chop or strong wind condition. This is a sport of brain rather than brawn.

But as we have seen on the brief highlights each night on TV, the racing is extremely tactical and close. Rick Dodson describes it as the closest sailing he has ever experienced.

Similarly with Dee Smith (USA) a professional sailor with America's Cup and Volvo Ocean Race campaigns in his log book. Smith is sailing in the singlehanded Norlin OD2.4 class - and is currently lying in 4th place overall. Smith is eligible for the Paralympics after suffering cancer in 2007 which attacked a vertebra which was subsequently removed, but his real physical damage stems from a bike crash in 2013.

Again Smith isn't proving to be unbeatable.

Two days ago, World Sailing (the rebranded International Sailing Federation) dropped a bombshell with the revised format for the Sailing World Cup.

The Final which is scheduled for Melbourne for December will be the last Sailing World Cup to be held in the Southern Hemisphere for the next four years.

Instead, the event will become largely Euro-centric except for events held in Japan, which takes over the event previously allocated to Qingdao, China. Miami keeps its spot - to keep the USA onside.

To some extent the Australians have themselves to blame, when their Olympic Team decided to bypass sailing in their home World Cup regatta, last year - opting instead for yet another training session in Rio.

Kiwi sailors can also share in the blame. Very few of our top Olympic sailors bothered to make the trip across The Ditch to sail in the nearest World Cup event to home.

For sure it was a useful regatta for up and coming Olympic sailors.

The Europeans have always been poor travelers - being there in numbers for any event to which they can drive.

The plan by World Sailing has been publicly criticised by Australian Sailing (the rebadged Yachting Australia) - a rare move for a national authority to come out and express public disappointment with its governing body.

The issue highlights an increasing issue within sailing - being the lack of international events outside class world championships which make their way Down Under.

The withdrawal of the America's Cup Qualifiers from Auckland in April 2015, is but one example of the trend.

Now, the only remaining regular event is the Volvo Ocean Race stopover for two weeks in Auckland every three years.

But of course when the Olympic medals won by Antipodeans are totaled, and the number of Australian and New Zealand sailors at the sharp end of America's Cup campaigns are counted - the winning does not lie with Europe.

It was a complete co-incidence that within a day of the World sailing announcement that former ISAf President Paul Henderson (CAN) announced that he would be standing for the World Sailing Presidency against the incumbent Carlo Croce (ITA) who is at the end of his four-year term, but is eligible to re-stand.

Henderson, known as the 'Pope of Sailing' received the backing of five nations necessary to get his nomination onto the World Sailing ballot paper; our information is that he had about ten countries prepared to sign his nomination form.

Always a forceful personality in the sport, Henderson is the antithesis of the consensus approach that has been the byline of World Sailing, since Henderson ended the second of his two terms as President in 2004.

We present a profile and video on Paul Henderson in this edition.

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Good sailing!

Richard Gladwell
NZ Editor

sailworldnzl@gmail.com

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