Sport keeps tinkering for Olympic Games

In Sailing, there is no fairer format than a series of evenly weighted course races that allow the cream to rise. However, that format – allegedly – doesn’t deliver sufficient entertainment for the Olympic Games.

Rather than risk the wrath of the International Olympic Committee, and have one of the founding competitions be eliminated from the Games, the sport keeps tinkering. While the 100-meter dash is won by the person that finishes first, a winner-take-all sailing race can have a cruel result.

The Men’s and Women’s One Person Dinghy events are trialing on October 7-12 a multi-stage format for Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, and the advance reviews are mixed:

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Ben Remocker:
This proposed format is the best chance we have to preserve the core of what sailing is while working within the IOC business. They need to entertain, and having a quick three-race series is a great compromise between fitting into a time window where medals are decided, but not succumbing to a single race shootout that simply does not reflect the best of sailing.

A three-race series can have many boats from many nations, who duke it out using typical sailing skills. Conversely, a first across the finish wins gold format requires a vastly reduced fleet size to ‘be fair’, reducing nations that will watch, and then arbitrarily rewards those sailors left, any of which can win a race at any time.

Congrats to the ILCA Class for their willingness to push really hard, but still preserve fleet racing!

Ben Nicholls:
It seems the administrators have missed the point….. If there is no wind, or too much wind, thunderstorms or thick fog there will be no racing to watch. Meddling with the format won’t change that.

To play with the format is to change the sport. With inclusion, affordability, and universality key metrics, the experiment sends half the sailors home after a few short races. That makes the sport very expensive in terms of cost per hour of competing.

A much more exciting format would be pre-Olympic qualifier racing. That way, the fleet racing at the Games in front of the cameras is much smaller numbers, the best of the best, the “final” series. Other sports have adopted this very successfully.

Chris Williams:
They haven’t gone far enough with the “sudden death” elements they are baking in. What if they add some reality show elements, like if you win a race, you get to pick one of the other sailors to be instantly eliminated? And maybe in another race the last place finishers are immediately eliminated?

Tom Charpentier:
So, you’re twisting fleet race scoring into a tournament format for the sake of watchability, but you’re not including team racing or match racing, disciplines that are more fun to watch and actually are played in a tournament format.