Great progress in a busy year!
Written by Stephen Park | 18 December 2014
As advent calendars are being opened and the increasingly frantic last minute shopping continues, our sailors are currently training or racing in four continents around the world, with most of them looking forward to flying back into the UK just in time to spend Christmas with their families.
2014 has been a busy year, and one that has seen some great progress by British Sailing Team sailors as we continue the march towards the 2016 Games. It’s strange to think that in just a couple of weeks’ time, the Olympic and Paralympic Games will be ‘next year’!
The Olympic Test event held in Rio during August was the first test for the world’s sailors to race on the Olympic race courses at the same time of year as the 2016 Games will be held. Our team performed well, and made the most of that opportunity.
In the Test Event two years out from the Games, each team can enter up to two crews in every class, with an aim to ensure that the fleet numbers are at least as high as they will be at the Olympic Games themselves. Winning eight medals in seven of the ten classes was a great performance and it gave our team a good feeling that they can deliver in Rio, which will help sailors continue to build their confidence in this tricky and much talked about venue.
Most of the Podium Squad are back in Rio now, training and racing in the Copa Brasil de Vela, which has a strong entry list and will be sure to provide both challenge and opportunity for our guys to further their experience of Guanabara Bay.
Rio itself is developing fast in anticipation of the rapidly approaching Olympic Games, with the Olympic venues sprouting up around the city, the building projects for Olympic village, new roads and metro lines all making furious progress.
Rio is never dull, however as always in the run up to an Olympic Games in a developing city, it is an especially exciting time.
Sailor performances at the ISAF World Championships in Santander in September, where the team successfully hit its UK Sport funding target of four medals, secured Team GB entries in all 10 classes for the Olympics themselves. This was a significant milestone and now the focus will move to the process of selecting the best sailors to fill those slots and represent the country, remembering that we can only enter one boat in each class. Competition to be one of those 15 sailors who will ultimately compete for Great Britain at the 2016 Olympics will be as tough as ever.
Our Paralympic classes sailors also managed to qualify in all three events for the 2016 Games at the first qualification opportunity – the IFDS Worlds – where they won medals in the two of the three events.
They have also been clocking up the hours in Rio this year, as they try to steal a march on the opposition by focussing on their venue knowledge. In the Paralympic classes this is often logistically more challenging than in the Olympic classes, as it is rare that you will find Paralympic sailors from other nations, even Brazil, training in Rio de Janeiro. Our guys have been fortunate to have some great British training partners giving their time to come to Rio, normally taking time from their own able-bodied sailing campaigns at home.
Meanwhile, based mainly at WPNSA, the Podium Potential Squad continues to develop our talents of the future. Lorenzo Chiavarini has led their charge this year winning the Laser u21 World and European Championships, and has subsequently been invited to join the group training in Rio now, while his squad colleagues embark upon training before the Christmas Race at Palamos, Spain.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to Palamos – the Christmas Race used to be one of Europe’s biggest Olympic class regattas back in the 1980s, and one where all our top sailors would spend their Christmas holidays back in the days before Olympic sailing became a full time career.
The sport has clearly moved on since those days, and continues to develop now, seeking to give better clarity to the premier Olympic class events and developing the opportunity for the sport to tell the stories of the best sailors from around the world.
In that vein, ISAF is making some big changes to the Sailing World Cup. The most significant of these is the introduction of a World Cup Grand Final, and we attended the initial concept trial in Abu Dhabi at the end of November which proved to be a great success. Although there is still plenty of work to be done before it can deliver against everyone’s expectation, it bodes well for the future. For this event, only the top 20 world ranked boats will receive invites to race in a year-end showdown, over four days, where the winner not only wins the World Cup Final, but takes home a reasonable share of the prize fund, which was US$220,000 for this year’s concept event.
2015 will see the next stage of the World Cup plans roll out, as the two new European legs of the series, in Hyeres and Weymouth and Portland will see the fleet limited to 40 boats in each class. For the first time ever maintaining your world ranking is going to be important for sailors wishing to attend the key regattas, and ultimately make it to Abu Dhabi next year.
It is an exciting step for the sport, and one we look to embrace as we head towards Rio 2016 and then Tokyo 2020.
In the meantime, I and all the members of the British Sailing Team thank you wholeheartedly for all your support this season.
We wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and look forward to continuing the journey with you in 2015!