Mike
Ooohhh, NOW you're backing out.( No pun intended)
Not sure that I want to know what pun I'm missing here... although I will admit that's the second St. Pauli's reference I've heard tonight, which is disturbing on many, many levels...
Mike
Challenge to SAIL???? This is not a made for TV X GAME.
Tom, If those guys were weekend warriors.... you could begin the debate... but most of these guys were full time sailors. Many with YEARS of winning at the international level. This is not an amateur level event... They have been TRAINING for two years... The crashes in the vids were the top of the fleet guys mark rounding... Not the silver fleet guys. The Olympic sailors that I know have gone swimming A LOT on that boat. The boat attitude and the lifting foils gets the boat to foil unstably and then it blows up before you can back off ... I call this NOT sea worthy. The A cats fixed the issue because that is what the A cat developers do...invent, adapt, and fix it and make it better....you get a faster and more sea worthy boat.. THAT IS NOT THIS GAME. This is supposed to be a race to sort out the sailing skills on a suitable boat.
The video shows a gust rolling down and taking out two boats at the same time... I call that BAD LUCK… ... Can't say if the boat should have blown up like that.. so... I will call it bad luck... The other crashes are a BAD BOAT causing bad luck.. Sure it is fair... they all suffer equally with a bad boat. Now races, regattas and medals, can be determined by the randomness of bad luck caused by the boat..
Does the rest of the video look that windy...? Do those little power boats look like they are going to be swamped in 25 to 30 knots... Not to me!!!
What are you defenders of the boat saying? Are you saying... well...Multihull racing was not really a good enough challenge... We need to give them a truly stupid boat so that the challenge is keep the pointy end up in 20+ knots when they get unlucky and hit by a gust.. .. and then do that speed and tactics and consistency thing that the other Olympic classes are doing..
The objective of the game is to beat the other teams by sailing… NOT running a survival contest roll of the dice plus sailboat racing..
The Nacra 17 looks like it is in survival mode in the low 20s..
I return to my central point... the boat is half baked. It should have been fixed in the previous two years. ISAF and Nacra corporate control this class... not sailors ... they should be held accountable.
Where are we now?.... Things are OK until somebody gets seriously hurt managing the silliness... and of course Rio will likely be a light air regatta....
So..they can wait for a serious injury and then put in wind limits... OR FIX THE BOAT.
The Americas cup competition just did the same thing to mangage their situation (can't fix the boat fairly... so wind limits.)....sadly only AFTER they killed somebody.
Well, there are those that actually sail catamarans, and then there are guys that just talk about sailing catamarans; I respect the sailors, and I have been on the water with them. I sure wish I still had the strength, endurance, and reflexes to race against them. Meanwhile; I'll throw out the buoys or count the finishers when they let me.
The death in the Americas Cup happened in conditions that were still legal to race in. The death happened when the front beam failed during a rounding. That was poor judgement to sail a boat with a structure in question on that beam. It failed during tow testing and had to be shored up to bring it out of the water.
Alll TRUE and the powers that be (including the Coast Guard) made a proactive move in this environment.
Would it have been better to do nothing?
if the boat is truly that unstable and the best sailors are still swimming, I'd be concerned at Rio where the latest article I read mentioned floating poopie in the race area.
Raw sewage in a semi-developed nation must be a cornucopia of little nasties waiting to prey on the unimmunized. Kind of like the cholera outbreak in Haiti
Then why didn't EVERYONE crash ????
or is it a case of bad sailing combined with bad luck ???
several other boats cleared the mark really well and went ahead in leaps n bounds...... lucky huh ... or just a superior skill set showing through ?
<img src="<>/smirk.gif" alt="smirk" title="smirk" height="15" width="15" />
a bad tradesman always blames his tools
<img src="<>/wink.gif" alt="wink" title="wink" height="15" width="15" />
Now there you go, destroying a perfectly good conspiracy theory with facts...
Mike