February 6, 2019
Experiment in Mallorca
The 50th jubilee, Trofeo Princesa Sofía Iberostar regatta, which will be held in Mallorca (Spain) from March 29 to April 6, will be the venue for an important experiment with World Sailing and the 470 Class Association.
The Trofeo Princesa Sofía program traditionally includes racing in Olympic yacht classes. But this time it will be expanded: in the class 470, for the first time in history, competitions of mixed crews will take place.
Recall that this discipline, according to the plans of World Sailing, should become Olympic in five years – at the Games-2024 in Paris.
Of course, no one is going to cancel habitual – separately male and female – competitions in the class 470 at the upcoming "Princess Sofia". Moreover, this time in the regatta – in preparation for the Olympics 2020 in Tokyo – the strongest crews will take part (according to the organizers, about a thousand yachtsmen from 55 countries intend to come to Majorca).
Mixed crews (who in the days of "Princess Sofia" will have to chase simultaneously with men) will be primarily youth, with a view to the Games-2024. Some teams, in particular, the UK, Switzerland and Spain, have already begun work in this direction.
According to Ferran Muneza, who is responsible for class 470 on the regatta organizing committee, it is necessary to start testing the new discipline in advance in order to understand which pitfalls you can run into when creating mixed teams. Indeed, in the same class, the Nacra 17 was not without problems.
366 February 6, 2019 # 8775
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