A letter from outgoing ISAF president Arve Sundheim to members of ISAF Council suggests there is unlikely to be a reconsideration of the Olympic events vote taken in Estoril back in early November.
Click here to download a pdf of the letter: isaf-sundheimresponse11dec07.pdf
Sundheim defends the voting procedure and claims that ISAF paid due consideration to the IOC’s requirements.
But pressure is building from national authorities to get a revote next May at the ISAF mid-year meeting in Qingdao. Following Yachting Australia’s and the Royal Yachting Association’s open requests for a revote, Yachting New Zealand is now also looking to do the same, according to a report on Sail World.
The YNZ statement says: “The Board of Yachting New Zealand has resolved to make a submission to the ISAF mid-year meeting requesting that the Events slate for the 2012 Olympic Games be revisited.
“The Board consulted with the Olympic Committee and the High Performance Committee on the matter and made the decision to make such a submission based on the longer term view of the future of sailing at the Olympics rather than the specific medal opportunities at the 2012 Games.”
Hallelujah! Sense prevails after all. Well done to the YNZ board members for being big enough to shift their stance to a more strategic vision rather than the self-serving approach of a few months ago.
Talking of strategy, that is the point that Rod Carr wanted to get across when I spoke to the RYA chief exec earlier today. “We want to see ISAF getting away from ‘sticking plaster’ politics and taking a more strategic approach to the future of the sport,” he said.
“That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. Even if ISAF said ‘match racing is part of our strategy’, we might not agree with it but we would at least go along with it, if that was part of a strategy that had been properly thought through.”
Carr has had a number of conversations with other national authorities behind the scenes, and is confident that sufficient momentum is building towards a revote next May. Among other nations that are believed to have written to ISAF are Canada, Spain, Austria and Singapore. A few others, like France, have yet to decide whether or not to follow suit.
Meanwhile, the members of the ISAF Athletes Commission are weighing up the possibility of running a questionnaire of all the competitors in the 2008 Olympic class World Championships, most of which are taking place in Australia or New Zealand in the next two months.
If they go ahead with this, it will be interesting to see how Olympic sailors themselves would choose the classes for 2012. We had some indication of that in the SailJuice survey a few weeks ago, although the sample of Olympic sailors was perhaps not sufficient to draw any hard conclusions.
By the way, I’m running an interview with the chairwoman of the Athletes Commission in my newsletter which I’ll be publishing later today. As winner of the past three 470 World Championships, Dutch sailor Marcelien de Koning is arguably the most talented female Olympic sailor currently competing. She has some fascinating insights into teamwork, and believes that sometimes it’s better for a woman to think like a man.
Wow! She could say that, I couldn’t possibly comment!
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