May 4, 2019
New face of the sailing Olympiad
On May 17-19 in London, in the premises of the famous Chelsea football club, meetings of the Mid-Annual Conference will be held. On May 17-19, London, in the offices of the famous Chelsea Football Club, there will be meetings of the Mid-Annual Conference of the International Sailing Federation (WS). This is what Oleg Ilyin, a member of the WS Council, told the VFPS website:
At this time, we can expect particularly heated discussions and ambiguous decisions. This is not surprising, since we all are witnessing the formation of a new Olympic sailing discipline, one can say the new era of Olympic sailing.
One of the “hot spots” will be a discussion of the outcome of the work of the Evaluation Committee, which presented its extensive report with recommendations on the election of the Olympic single in the men's and women's categories at the Olympic Games-2024.
Recall that the program of the nearest Games 2020, which will be held in the Japanese city of Enoshima, has long been formed and approved. As for the year 2024, World Sailing needs to approve the classes of Olympic yachts by December of this year. Further WS proposals will go to the International Olympic Committee, which will finally approve the program of the Olympic Games-2024 in August 2020.
In the meantime, there is a process of comprehensive assessment of sailing ships – candidates for the Olympic status. There were four projects in the discharge of single-headed dinghies: RS Aero, Laser, Melges 14, D-ZERO. The main parameters of the candidates are presented in the Table.
From 11 to 15 March 2019, on the basis of the famous Spanish yacht club Real Club Naútico de Valencia, 12 members of the Evaluation Commission, who are the leading experts of the WS Committees, together with the riders, conducted the so-called Evaluations (evaluation competitions) and gave a comprehensive assessment of the submitted projects.
And here is the first sensation: almost unanimously, the Evaluation Committee gave preference to the RS Aero project. The Committee’s opinion was supported by the national federations, which sent their assessments in response to the WS questionnaire. The riders noted the simplicity and identity of the RS Aero hull design, a reasonable combination of racing characteristics and the price-quality ratio of the boat.
The RS Aero Schvertboat was designed and built by RS Sailing, a company known for a whole family of popular lightweight class boats. The new dinghy was launched in the series and was published only five years ago, in 2014. And soon gained recognition in many, especially European countries.
For comparison, the "Laser" unexpectedly caused serious criticism from athletes. First of all, the unsatisfactory quality of the spars and weapons (sails) in comparison with the price, as well as the fact that in the women's category the boat is designed for relatively heavy and high athletes.
In the near future, the website of the All-Russian Federation Federation of Forensic Sciences will provide readers with more complete information on the remaining candidate boats. And, of course, we will talk in detail about the course of discussions at the World Sailing Mid-Annual Conference.
251 May 4, 2019 # 8993
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