Olympic Boats

So the deals are done, The Nacra 17 and the 49erFX are the new classes. I am really happy that the voices of the sailors were the defining factors in the selection. We have seen to many times in the past with ISAF that the politics interfered with the best solutions. Some strange things still exist in the Olympic sailing arena... Now we have 4 dinghys (2 x 470 and 2 x 49er) and only 1 cat, no keel boats at all!! Its a pretty sorry representation of the sport as a worldwide presence, but its what we have for the next 4 years so i hope it works. The Cat selection is where most of my thoughts lie... I really think the best solution for cat sailing in general would have been to select the F18 class, let everyone go sailing for 3.5 years and then by tender you select the supplied boats for the games and notify the athletes 6 months out from the games. Then you are simply building the already strong F18 fleet and you have ready made high level racing available in many countries... Sure there would be bugs in the system and controls would be hard to manage, but nothing that was impossible. Anyhow, we have the Nacra 17, its the best solution from the boats presented for sure. We decided to not send the flying Phantom about 6 weeks prior to the event because we considered the specs and the expectations from the boats and we were pretty sure it was too big a leap for ISAF to take. We will have the boat out in public soon and it will get heads turning, just check out the daggerboard!

Anyhow, back to the Nacra 17. It looks like a nice boat and when they have the mast sorted out it should be a very reliable product with a long competitive life. There are always issues with SMOD gear for the games and aside from the mast I can see that the sail shape variance will be an area of focus. Funnily enough it would be easier to make identical mainsails if they were crosscut, much like the now outlawed Sail-Innovation 2 cloth mainsails from the F18 class. It is just reducing the areas for human error and thats what we need for Olympic level gear. I certainly hope there is some investigation on that area by Pete V. Whilst the Nacra Infusion sails are generally quite good, we did have fast ones and not so fast ones from the same pattern.. Good luck to the Nacra guys, they have a lot of work ahead and by my reckoning, not a massive profit margin when all things are accounted for..