Tokyo 2020

[bait]

https://tokyo2020.org/en/special/readysteadytokyo/sailing/results/

one year out from the 2020 Olympics in Japan and the top US Sailing Team members are competing at the Olympic test event.. Anyone see any improvement over Rio?

As the Olympic classes really have no fleets competing in the US, the initial results after only two days of sailing are predictable. Hopefully the rest of the event will go better. Lot of races left. Hard to watch the US sailors be relegated to fleet fillers in a few classes. And in a few of the classes the US has not even qualified to compete as a country yet. 

While the 2020 Olympics will be what they will be, we will have 8 years to build programs to be competitive for the LA Olympics in 2028. Probably a waste of effort thinking about it as Olympic sailing in the US  seems to be forgotten. Personally I still enjoy the event.

 

[Wavedancer II]

Charlotte Rose may be the best US Radial sailor right now and she isn't there...

The US guys (Buckingham and Barnard) in the Laser could be top ten. The 470 guys have a chance as well.

I agree that some of the others don't appear to have realistic medal chances, but this is just a test event.

 

[Curious]

https://tokyo2020.org/en/special/readysteadytokyo/sailing/results/

one year out from the 2020 Olympics in Japan and the top US Sailing Team members are competing at the Olympic test event.. Anyone see any improvement over Rio?

As the Olympic classes really have no fleets competing in the US, the initial results after only two days of sailing are predictable. Hopefully the rest of the event will go better. Lot of races left. Hard to watch the US sailors be relegated to fleet fillers in a few classes. And in a few of the classes the US has not even qualified to compete as a country yet. 

While the 2020 Olympics will be what they will be, we will have 8 years to build programs to be competitive for the LA Olympics in 2028. Probably a waste of effort thinking about it as Olympic sailing in the US  seems to be forgotten. Personally I still enjoy the event.

But what countries DO have fleets competing in (for example) 49ers, Nacras and 470s?  The 470 is popular in some places but it's got very small fleets in some countries that do well - the last US 470 nationals, for example, seems to have attracted three times as many boats as the last Australian nationals I can find results for, but the Australian men still finish on top. The Kiwis got 13 49ers to their nationals (not all of them locals) and the USA got nine - surely that four extra boats is not the reason the Kiwis dominate and the USA doesn't?  The Dutch claim that their RSX fleet is all but dead, but they still win gold medals. In Nacras, the Argentinians and Australians had no local fleet but scored 1-2 in Rio. So where is the evidence that the presence of a local fleet is related to being at the front of the fleet?

 

[bait]

Good Point  regarding national fleets. Maybe these current Olympic classes are just traveling road shows. The major events bring out the numbers and the countries, but to your point there are not really any large national fleets. Interesting.

looks like a couple of us sailors have punched up into single digits after day three of racing. At least a chance at the medal round is a step forward. Even if out of medal contention. Year to go and it will be fun to see who can step up their game on a world level. 

It was great to see Charlotte Rose at the laser radial worlds produce results. Consistency will be the key. 

 

[European Bloke]

The only 'Olympic Fleet' in the UK is probably the Laser, and it's not what it was.

Those guys train in small groups and travel to regattas.  Local fleets are irrelevant, probably because none of their competitors would be in a position to challenge them.  However good a yachter they might be they wouldn't be sailing 7 days a week 50+ weeks a year.

 

[greenwhiteblack]

In my mind the US has only one medal prospect who wouldn't be considered a "dark horse" or outsider -  Paige Railey.

The model for Olympic success for 'larger countries' is pretty simple and has been repeated by AUS, GBR, NZL et al for the last 4 quads or so. You need squads of Olympic classes which actively train together and share information which have one or two stand out members. You then need to integrate talented youth sailors in to these squads (top 10 at youth worlds or so) as they transition to Olympic classes. Wait about 8 years and you'll have a few medal making machine. In AUS, we were very fortunate to have a cohort of extremely talented sailors with good coaching in the late 90s/early 00s who were able to lay the foundations of this system for future generations.

At the moment, a number of the US squads are fractured, with the top members wanting to pursue their own programs. The Radial and Finn squads are leading the way in this regard. There could easily be medal winning programs in the 470 and Laser Std. if all parties were willing to cooperate. That being said, based on the current crop of youth sailors in the US, I can see the US having a medal haul in 2028 to rival that of the 84 games; assuming all classes can adopt the aforementioned model.

 

[JimC]

The only 'Olympic Fleet' in the UK is probably the Laser, and it's not what it was.

I think its probably fair to say that the 20-30 fleet in the Laser is minimal in the UK. Huge masters fleet, but not relevant to the Olympics.

The model for Olympic success for 'larger countries' is pretty simple and has been repeated by AUS, GBR, NZL et al for the last 4 quads or so. You need squads of Olympic classes which actively train together and share information which have one or two stand out members. You then need to integrate talented youth sailors in to these squads (top 10 at youth worlds or so) as they transition to Olympic classes.

I agree. The adult classes are pretty much irrelevant. Once the talent is identified at youth level they transition to whichever Olympic classes they are physically suited for and don't really join in with general adult sailing. Its all squad training and International events.

 

[Curious]

While all the above is very true, it's nice to see that there are exceptions; in at least two of the classes in Tokyo there are still sailors (one of them currently ranked #1) who will still do local or amateur regattas; one of them did so just three weeks ago, and in another class. The other did half a dozen races at their local club last year and didn't always win.  It doesn't really deflect from the truth of the posts above, of course, but it's nice to know that some of the Olympic squad sailors will mix it with mortals - for a while.

 

[cbulger]

You can't expect to win medals in a sport that is unpopular in our country and adult dinghy sailing is unpopular in the US..  For the most part - American adults have given up athletic dinghy sailing in favor of sailing in a seated position on boats with lead fins.  We call them "sport boats" - but what percentage of J/70 sailors could manage to get an 18 foot skiff across the harbor right side up?   

 Kids want to do what the cool adults are doing - so in the US that means that kids who want to keep sailing are aspiring to sit on the rail of a "sport" or keel boat - if they are athletically inclined they find another sport.  Look at the countries that dominate the olympics and you will see adults sailing athletic dinghies in large numbers.   In Australia, opti kids want to sail an 18 foot skiff.  That keeps young athletes in the sport and pushing hard thru their teen years.   The pool of potential Olympians is huge and they sharpen their skills against each other.

No lonely 2 boat training program - for young adults who spent their college years sailing slow boats - can compete.

We will start dominating the dinghy world about the time that New Zealand starts dominating basketball.

 

[Bruce Hudson]

We will start dominating the dinghy world about the time that New Zealand starts dominating basketball.

Unlikely.   (Though the US is more likely to have more medals in the future. Who can forget 2002 when NZ placed 4th in the FIBA World Cup?).

Sailing is not the most popular sport in NZ/Australia/UK either - not by a long way.

---

There is a conflation between what is good for sailing and what it takes to win medals. 

Most have an elite squad who train together - but it doesn't even take that. There are plenty of examples where medals a won by 'outsiders', from small countries which don't have an elite squad.

---

Most of the hard yards are done in the junior classes - which is used to find excellence. The best are then 'tapped on the shoulder' to go do world youth events etc. The stronger a junior program (strength isn't about numbers) - the more likely medals will be won 10-20 years down the track.

 

[MR.CLEAN]

results worse than before Rio, and we know how that went

 

[camasonian]

I don't think sailing is necessarily more unpopular in the US than skiing.   I'm talking about ski racing not futzing around the mountain recreationally or going on ski vacations.  Yet the US does pretty well on the world scene when it comes to ski racing.  There are very few youth ski racing programs limited to a very few parts of the country.  And 95% of kids under 18 want to be snowboarding not skiing anyway.

Why is sailing so different?

Perhaps one difference is that the top US skiers basically spend all their time on tour with the Euros and that doesn't happen so much in sailing?

 

[greenwhiteblack]

I can't comment about the US ski racing scene and how it relates to college attendance, but as has been stated ad nauseam, I still see college sailing (and college sports in general) being a large part of the problem in the US Sailing. 

Here in AUS, nearly every uni has an agreement with Sport Australia (formerly Australian Institute of Sport) which says that those schools have to offer flexible study arrangements to members of their 'elite sports programs'. This allows Aussie sailors to tailor their studies around their sailling rather than vice versa, which seems to be the case in the US. As I understand it, non-Varsity sports in the US don't have the kind of support that varsity sports do at colleges. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure if Sailing qualifies as a varsity sport at a lot of colleges given non-NCAA. In addition, a lot of Aussie sailors don't even go to uni before launching an Olympic campaing. This is most likely a funding issue, I'd say that our top youth sailors would get significantly more funding to transition in to Olympic classes than their US counterparts. 

Training as a full time athlete in the college/transition to Olympic classes age is one of the most important factors in generating high performance, as this age range is the 'peak' of the development/learning curve. 

Most have an elite squad who train together - but it doesn't even take that. There are plenty of examples where medals a won by 'outsiders', from small countries which don't have an elite squad.

I think you'll find that the smaller countries who have 'once in a generation talents' end up having those sailors train in elite multi-national squads regardless of their country. For example, Pavlos Kontides and Tonci Stipanovic train together in the same group in Split, Croatia and have done so for the last decade or so along side sailors from HUN, RUS, JPN to name a few. Similarly, the CRO Mens 470 team who won gold in Rio had a training partner arrangement with the French 470 program pre-Rio. 

 

[camasonian]

I can't comment about the US ski racing scene and how it relates to college attendance, but as has been stated ad nauseam, I still see college sailing (and college sports in general) being a large part of the problem in the US Sailing. 

Here in AUS, nearly every uni has an agreement with Sport Australia (formerly Australian Institute of Sport) which says that those schools have to offer flexible study arrangements to members of their 'elite sports programs'. This allows Aussie sailors to tailor their studies around their sailling rather than vice versa, which seems to be the case in the US. As I understand it, non-Varsity sports in the US don't have the kind of support that varsity sports do at colleges. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure if Sailing qualifies as a varsity sport at a lot of colleges given non-NCAA. In addition, a lot of Aussie sailors don't even go to uni before launching an Olympic campaing. This is most likely a funding issue, I'd say that our top youth sailors would get significantly more funding to transition in to Olympic classes than their US counterparts. 

Training as a full time athlete in the college/transition to Olympic classes age is one of the most important factors in generating high performance, as this age range is the 'peak' of the development/learning curve. 

I think you'll find that the smaller countries who have 'once in a generation talents' end up having those sailors train in elite multi-national squads regardless of their country. For example, Pavlos Kontides and Tonci Stipanovic train together in the same group in Split, Croatia and have done so for the last decade or so along side sailors from HUN, RUS, JPN to name a few. Similarly, the CRO Mens 470 team who won gold in Rio had a training partner arrangement with the French 470 program pre-Rio. 

In the US I'm sure it is 99% a funding issue and 1% to do with inflexibility at the university level.

In the US there are millions of nontraditional college students attending part time, nights, weekends, seasonally, whatever.  That's common.  Maybe not at super elite Ivy League universities but at ordinary public universities.   The more likely problem is that ordinary college students can't afford to both attend school and pursue sailing careers and there isn't the corporate sponsorship for top young athletes like there is in skiing and snowboarding.

There are plenty of young athletes in sports like tennis and gymnastics that basically attend sports academies to develop their skills and take tutored classes on the side.  I don't see that same sort of thing in sailing.

I would also be loath to change the university sailing scene either.  I did it a generation ago and it was something I could walk into without any previous experience and have lots of fun sailing in university regattas in the Pacific Northwest. We got toasted by the top teams from places like UW and Royal Rhodes.  But still had lots of fun and learned lots.  University sailing should be something that actual ordinary college students can walk up and try.  I wouldn't want to turn it into something like track where universities have become training grounds for top athletes from around the globe and ordinary kids stand no chance to walk onto the team and have fun at their own university.

 

[greenwhiteblack]

In the US I'm sure it is 99% a funding issue and 1% to do with inflexibility at the university level.

That being said, the US seems to have a lot more families in sailing who are so independently wealthy that they can afford to fund an entire Olympic campaign in any given class without support from US Sailing. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least two-three current USST/ODP members in that position. Thats two-three more than AUS has.

Thus, the inflexibility may not be from the Colleges themselves, but from the parents and sailors to diverge from the societal 'life pathway'. I can't say that I know every USST member, but it seems like a much higher proportion go to college than in the AUS Sailing Team, or at least go to college full time 

 

[Curious]

You can't expect to win medals in a sport that is unpopular in our country and adult dinghy sailing is unpopular in the US..  For the most part - American adults have given up athletic dinghy sailing in favor of sailing in a seated position on boats with lead fins.  We call them "sport boats" - but what percentage of J/70 sailors could manage to get an 18 foot skiff across the harbor right side up?   

 Kids want to do what the cool adults are doing - so in the US that means that kids who want to keep sailing are aspiring to sit on the rail of a "sport" or keel boat - if they are athletically inclined they find another sport.  Look at the countries that dominate the olympics and you will see adults sailing athletic dinghies in large numbers.   In Australia, opti kids want to sail an 18 foot skiff.  That keeps young athletes in the sport and pushing hard thru their teen years.   The pool of potential Olympians is huge and they sharpen their skills against each other.

No lonely 2 boat training program - for young adults who spent their college years sailing slow boats - can compete.

We will start dominating the dinghy world about the time that New Zealand starts dominating basketball.

There's probably a lot to agree with in that post, but in Australia most kids (in my experience) don't really want to sail an 18 Foot Skiff (which are raced from just two clubs in a country the size of the lower 48); they really want to sail a Sharpie, NS14, Laser, Cherub, Moth, 505, Hobie or F18, etc.

From the outside it may seem like quibbling, but it can also be said that there's a big and very significant difference. For many kids, a Sharpie, NS, Laser, 505 etc is something they can sail each weekend, off their own bat, at an affordable club near them. It's an accessible and realistic goal- a boat they see around their local waterway, and a boat that they could be sailing within a year or two, without changing their entire life or spend one weekend a month driving hundreds of clicks. The ones I know who are in Tokyo at the moment came from parents who actively race at weekends at their local club (which can be as cheap as $250-450 perf year). Tom Slingsby is said to have been inspired by the Schiedt v Ainslie battle in Sydney 2000, although that overlooks the fact that he was already a damn good junior sailor. Many others came from places where 18s are never seen. Looking historically, when the Skiff classes were stronger here we were cactus in dinghy sailing at the Olympics for some time. From 1900 to 2000, the only thing we got in dinghies was three bronze medals. 

So the point is that you're right that the issue is likely to lie in the fact that few US sailors sail dinghies, but perhaps the problem is not that they don't have 18s as inspiration but the fact that they don't have a strong, accessible club with adults sailing Lasers, V15s, Snipes and 505s each week as inspiration - and that is a very different problem with a very different cure.

 

[camasonian]

That being said, the US seems to have a lot more families in sailing who are so independently wealthy that they can afford to fund an entire Olympic campaign in any given class without support from US Sailing. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least two-three current USST/ODP members in that position. Thats two-three more than AUS has.

Thus, the inflexibility may not be from the Colleges themselves, but from the parents and sailors to diverge from the societal 'life pathway'. I can't say that I know every USST member, but it seems like a much higher proportion go to college than in the AUS Sailing Team, or at least go to college full time 

Well yes.  No shortage of uber-wealthy yachties here.  

Not everything is about the Olympics.  I kind of like that ordinary kids can go out and learn to sail at most university programs without having to be world-class athletes.  That is as it should be.  The point of university shouldn't be to train up world-class athletes but rather provide opportunities for the students who are there anyway.  

University itself has gotten to be a competitive sport here among the rich as demonstrated by all the college admissions scandals recently.  I expect it is the parents who are driving that sort of thing.   That said, there are plenty of kids on the west coast here who drop out and spend years doing competitive outdoor sports like rock climbing, surfing, etc.  I expect the super-organized nature of sailing as well as the cost of boats and facilities compared to these other sorts of sports is what makes it less interesting to the young.

 

[Bruce Hudson]

So the point is that you're right that the issue is likely to lie in the fact that few US sailors sail dinghies, but perhaps the problem is not that they don't have 18s as inspiration but the fact that they don't have a strong, accessible club with adults sailing Lasers, V15s, Snipes and 505s each week as inspiration - and that is a very different problem with a very different cure.

Totally agree.

I was inspired like a lot of NZders by Peter Lester winning the 1977 OK World Champs in Takapuna. The mainstream local media went nuts. The picture of him being carried out of the water atop of his boat to cheering locals was on most newspapers front page. The 470s was also big, McKay / Wilcox winning 1981, 1983 & 1984. Then NZ got Olympic gold in 1984 in the Tornado and the Finn. Bronze in Windsurfing...

...me seeing the Olympics and World Championships as the pinnacle of all sports that I cared about was a driver for sure.

But then, one conversation changed my attitude towards sailing forever. I was rigging a Paper Tiger at Takapuna about to go out for a practice blast - grinning in anticipation - I was too big for the class but was sailing them anyway. Anyhow, a guy I knew from juniors and youth sailing came up to me and said hi. I didn't recognize him at first because his hair had turned blonde, his skin was dark and his body was literally a different shape to what I had remembered. He told me that over the previous 12 months he had sailed every single day except Christmas day. He said that the fun had gone out sailing and it was now like a job. He told me that he was jealous of me because I still clearly had the passion - and at least on that day - he didn't. About 12 months later he won an Olympic medal.

On reflection, I realized how important the passion was - and vowed to always put passion first. (Actually I had a few years in the wilderness... but found it again when I returned to Lasers - it is the racing I love.) 

What I'm trying to say here is that passion is just as important as many of the other factors - if you have a dedicated passionate community behind you when you are going for gold it makes a huge difference. It makes funding a lot easier, plus it is the passionate community that produces champions in the first place.

 

[Board skiff]

What’s the US Sailing Olympic budget?  Team GBR get about £25m (~US$30m).