ah... but I am not arguing cat sailor... just high performance apparent wind machines.... skiffs and cats are different then 470s and lasers. boards/kites will be different again.
There are so few woman cat sailors at the elite level before the Mixed Multihull discipline... it will be tough to argue either way... if Carolihn Brower competes and wins... does it prove my point??? Not really.
The virtually complete lack of Usual suspects in the class was appealing for many countries..... everyone started off at about the same level and you have a shot.
I would look at the woman's skiff ranks... they had a bit more of a pipeline before woman's skiffs made the games.
One other Cat example came to mind... the Swedes had a guy with a medal in stars (I think) who jumped onto the Tornado for his next campaign... it did not go well (Two or three cycles ago). mind you he had 1000s of hours into the game and a medal as well.. but you need to be putting that time into the exact skills you need.
Mark,
I'll agree that the apparent wind background is very important. Neither my helm nor I had ever sailed cats before buying our F18, but Brooks (my helm) had sailed 29ers at a very high level in high school. We found the transition to the cat to be pretty straightforward. We also benefited from the help of a lot of good teams.
I think this is a HUGE set of points to make.... LOTS of sailors and Good sailors to help are key..
I think this is the US achilles... Its a huge country and the critical mass is just not there... moreover... you don't have a lot of the former elite sailors still in the game all be it at much less intensity.
I can tell you that this isn't the case.
As one of JC's best friends, trying to find time to invite him and his new fiancee over for dinner is impossible since he's ALWAYS training.
;P
Just going from the interview, that is what they said. They will not be sailing OVER THERE.
I think that they need more of it, not less. Just my opinion, again based on what I heard in the interview.
Mike
Three Dutch teams in the medal race and two on the podium, nice results for such a small country <img src="<>/smile.gif" alt="smile" title="smile" height="15" width="15" />
Congrats to JC on his 10th place as well.
Interesting to see how young this fleet is with almost none of the
old
T sailors from the 2008 games present (Mitch, Bundy, etc).
Anyway, that interview is quite telling. Sarah looks utterly disgusted. Not sure of the timing of the video relative to the protest, or if something else was going on.
Mike
I have it on good authority that their was photographic evidence that they had broken overlap and should not have been penalized,but they chose not to pursue it any farther so they could maintain focus on the sailing.Kudos to them. Also sounds like team syndicate politics may be in full play.
I agree, sometimes, no one
wins
a protest.
Mike
The first 6 races were just practise?
Seems a lot of folks pissed about it. . .
Is ISAF’s new scoring system at the World Cup events crap?