What should Olympic sailing be? What should it represent, and what should it be trying to achieve? Actually, it’s not a question that needs to be pondered too deeply, because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) makes it very clear what it expects from all 26 of the constituent sports in the Olympic Games.

The IOC uses 33 criteria against which all sports are measured. Some of the measures consider a sport in a number of ways, which include:

“universality”: global spread of the sport
“popularity”: appeal to spectators and TV audience
“image and environment”: gender equity and impact on the environment
“costs”: the operating cost of running the event at the Olympics.


Now the question is, how well is sailing doing in relation to these criteria? This has a question that Phil Jones and a group of experts have been exploring for the past year. Phil hails from Nottingham but moved out to Australia more than a decade ago, and has since become head of Yachting Australia, the Aussie equivalent of the RYA. How a Pommie was ever allowed the top job by a bunch of Aussie yachties is still beyond me, but he has earned a lot of respect for doing a good job downunder.

For the past year and a bit, Phil has also headed up the ISAF Olympic Commission, a group charged with exploring the future for sailing in the Olympics.  After more than 12 months of exhaustive research, Phil’s group published a document which was presented to ISAF Council at a meeting in Lake Balaton in May.

Having read through the report and spoken to Phil at some length, it is amazing that sailing is in the Olympics at all. It spectacularly fails to hit some of the IOC targets in a number of key areas. For example, in terms of TV coverage, sailing came last of the 28 sports featured at the Beijing Games in 2008 (two sports have since been thrown out for London 2010: baseball and softball). In terms of global reach, the sport does not do much better. For example, out of 53 nations in the continent of Africa, only 15 are members of the International Sailing Federation.

Why should I care, you might be asking yourself? After all, if sailing was thrown out of the Olympic Games after 2012, would it affect recreational sailing? Probably not that much. But as Phil points out, the questions that the IOC criteria pose to any sport which wants to be part of the five-ringed circus are not such terrible questions to ask anyway.

“We went through the IOC criteria and asked ourselves the question, which of these things wouldn’t we want for sailing?” says Phil. “Which criteria wouldn’t we want to improve?  There are things like the question of its universality spread around the world; its popularity; the fairness of the Olympic qualifications system and so on.  All those areas, you look at, and you say, those are things we’d want anyway. So it is not as if we are simply trying to meet criteria the IOC set down, but in terms of enhancing the sport as a global sport, these are things we would also want to do.”

According to the report, ISAF should:

* expand the reach and appeal of sailing - to emerging nations and
sailors, and to spectators and the media.

* reduce costs - for sailors and MNAs, for event organisers, for IOC and
the media.

* build more consistency and continuity to our Olympic decisions, giving member national authorities (MNAs such as the RYA) better return on their Olympic investment, and providing sailors a clear pathway for sailors from junior to youth to Olympic.

* focus Olympic strategy more on youth, and encourage adoption of more exciting (for athlete and spectator) events and equipment.

* introduce more structure to the annual calendar of sailing events.


If ISAF is to take heed of Phil’s report, then root and branch reform is going to be needed. Tough love on a massive scale. The question is, will ISAF ever be able to grasp the level of change required? Not even close, if history is anything by which to judge ISAF. After six years of his eight-year presidency of ISAF, Goran Petersson has thus far done little to suggest he’s the man to lead the organisation through such widespread change. But to give him his due, the president did at least ask ISAF Council at the Balaton meeting if there was anyone who believed that ‘no change’ was an option. None of the 38 representatives put up their hands, and for Phil Jones that is a vital first step towards Olympic reform. The worst thing that ISAF could do would to fiddle while Rome burns. This report calls for massive action.

The report highlights just how narrow-focused ISAF is on an issue that is really much wider than the choice of equipment, the favourite topic of argument amongst ISAF politicians and indeed the wider sailing fraternity, amongst which I include myself. The issues really are much bigger than the choice between a keelboat or a multihull.

That said, it was the controversial culling of the multihull from the Olympic roster back in 2007 which prompted Phil to put forward a proposal to ISAF, saying that it was time to have a root and branch review of what Olympic sailing should be. Suffice it to say that Phil thought that the multihull’s rejection from the 2012 Olympic line-up was a gross error, as was the selection of women’s match racing over women’s skiff sailing.

“Back in 2005 the IOC Programme Commission published a report with information from ISAF,” Phil recalls. “It said we were going to make the sport more entertaining and attractive in the Olympic Games by introducing fast and more exciting boats.  Of course two years later in 2007, the decision was made to take out the multihull and also at the same time, not to introduce a high performance dinghy for women. So the issue for us was this: whether you believe introducing faster, more exciting boats is going to make the sport more relevant to the Olympics isn’t the question. The issue is: you can’t say something and then two years later do something diametrically opposite.” In other words, a strategy was required.

Phil continues: “What we need to be looking at is equipment that’s challenging to sail, but also Olympic equipment that is as far as possible out of the box, one-design equipment, which therefore would be capable of being supplied in major events.” When he says major events, he’s referring not just to the staple diet of World and European championships, but other lesser-known continental events such as the All African Games and the Asian Games. These might barely register on our radar screen in the wealthy west, but to the IOC they hold equal value to a European or North American championship.

While Phil says the report makes no direct criticism of existing events and equipment in the current Olympic line-up, he does acknowledge that keelboats will have a hard time justifying their future in this brave new world. “There is certainly a question as to whether the keelboat fulfils the criteria that an Olympic event need to meet. When you look at the IOC’s priorities and how we can meet these, there needs to be a clear focus on youth with a pathway into Olympic competition; equipment that’s inexpensive, both from a capital and development perspective; and boats that are widely available around the world.” Keelboats are expensive to buy, expensive to move and difficult to get in and out of the water.

Another big IOC criterion is gender parity, aiming for equal numbers of men and women athletes at the Games. When I did some research into active numbers of Olympic sailors back in 2007, there was a strong trend that revealed itself in all classes where there was a reasonable comparison to be made between the sexes. When comparing men’s and women’s numbers in the 470, RS-X, Laser singlehanders and keelboat divisions, broadly there were twice the number of men actively competing on the circuit as women, except for the Yngling which could muster only a pitiful fraction of the Stars being actively campaigned.

From those numbers it becomes clear that convincing women to compete at Olympic level is much harder than convincing men to do the same, but perhaps one answer would to have compulsorily mixed events with say, a man and a women racing a skiff or catamaran together. Whenever I’ve posed this question before, the stock reply has been that IOC frowns on such ideas, for what reason I never quite understood. However, on this point Phil was very encouraging: “Our latest advice is that the IOC would entertain compulsory mixed events.” He believes this is something that should now be openly discussed within ISAF.

Reading Phil’s report is both enlightening and frightening at the same time. By focusing the report on what the IOC expects of sailing rather than what we in sailing think the Olympic regatta should be, it highlights the vulnerability of sailing’s position in the Games if the status quo remains. But it also shows how much further our sport can grow. Sailing is still a first-world, white man’s pastime, but it could be so much more than that. It is not yet a truly global sport, and the challenges to make it so are immense. However, as Phil acknowledges, ISAF are beginning to make some good baby steps towards addressing this big issue, implementing new ideas such as the Connect to Sailing programme.

Now that Phil Jones’s Olympic Commission report is out there, it could be the carrot, the catalyst for ISAF to really grasp the possibilities and opportunities of bringing sailing to new parts of the world. Or this report could also become the stick that the IOC uses to beat sailing out of the Olympics if ISAF just sits on its hands and does nothing.