Live Sail Die Insider No Crap Olympic Preview (Part One)

August 8th, 2008

By Charles Olney

The venue

An insult to Olympic athletes. This is just another example of the IOC and ISAF showing complete disrespect to all sailors. With sailing having difficulty maintaining its position in the Olympics at all, its hard to fathom why this venue was chosen in the first place and, approved by all the powers that be.

There are better alternatives in China and Hong Kong and it’s a shame that sailing will now be depicted as a novelty event, rather than as an elite competition to decide the worlds best.. Most public interest will be centred around whether the algae problem has been fixed, not on the incredible skills and talents on display in the event itself. Didn’t the nations bidding for the 2008 games have some basic guidelines to work with? No GOLD here!

The Australian Sailing Team (AST)

With the exception of the Laser, the Olympic classes fleets are almost non existent in Australia..Try and find a competitive fleet of Stars or Finns! The result is that some classes had NO competition for selection at all and NO competitor could be found for the Mens RSX!

This makes the task of the AST so very difficult.

But it seems that rather than address the underlying issues, the focus has been to grab only the already successful junior talent, and put all the effort and funding into one, or at best two crews in each class. Very shortsighted and disrespectful towards those who are not quite on their radar screen …… YET!

Until AST/YA understands that this is a sport made up of more than just Sydneysiders and legends, then all actions and results will be viewed as ‘short-term’ glory. The team was in almost exactly the same position going into the 2004 games in Athens. No medals to the ‘medal - maker’,then!

The funding is NOT an issue, as some AST members have been overheard discussing the problem of ‘how’ to spend all the money!

There is no doubt that the sailors will bust their guts for AUS and hopefully all will win Gold. It is, however, highly unlikely, so even one medal will be a welcome improvement on 2004.

One wonders what will happen to funding if NO medals in 2008

Part two will look at our medal prospects.

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