Have you ever heard of the story of the boiling frog? To borrow from that font of reliable knowledge, Wikipedia: "The boiling frog story states that a frog can be boiled alive if the water is heated slowly enough — it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out." To learn more, click here.
Anyway, sorry, I digress from the main story, that for the second consecutive year ISAF Council has ignored the recommendations of its expert committees and sub-committees and opted - as it invariably does - for the status quo. I suppose any of us that wanted progress should be happy that the 29erXX even made it this far, and the 19:16 vote suggests it is only a matter of time before the women get their high performance doublehander. The trouble is that in the Olympic world, 'a matter of time' is measured out in batches of four years.
The earliest that women will now be able to compete for a medal in a modern high performance skiff is the 2016 Games, which would mean the women got their high performance boat 16 years after the men got theirs, the 49er having first appeared in Sydney 2000. It's a sad indictment of the inherent conservatism and lack of vision of ISAF's top table. Remember that ISAF Council can't even take credit for the 49er's inclusion. That was the then-President of ISAF, the maverick Paul Henderson, who railroaded the 49er past the selection process. Sometimes dictatorship gets better results than democracy.
So who voted 470 and who voted 29erXX? Er, we don't know, because it was a conducted under a secret ballot. And only yesterday Goran Petersson was telling us: "it is the Council who are the true democratic voice of ISAF." And here was me thinking that openness and accountability were the underpinnings of a democratic process.
Apparently the decision to opt for a secret voting process was in response to the venom and vitriol from some rather rabid supporters of the multihull lobby, who published Council members' email and phone numbers on public internet forums and so forth. I have some sympathy with that, as I came in for a bit of hate mail myself, and I was on the multihull sailors' side! So heaven knows what the Council members who voted keelboat instead of multihull were getting through their electronic letter boxes.
But even so, this is politics. You expect mudslinging, and if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. The actions of a few email terrorists are not sufficient reason for Council to go all secret on us. Quite apart from the fact that it ain't democratic, we can't learn much from what happened today either. As the CEO of the 49er class, Marcus Spillane, said to me: "We'd like to know why people voted the way they did so we can talk to them and understand what it was about the 29erXX that wouldn't have worked for them. As it is, we remain in the dark about that, and so it was an opportunity wasted."
Some Council members said they were in favour of the 29erXX in principle, but that 'now' wasn't the right time. Well, when exactly is the right time? There will never be a right time. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and get on with it.
The Council member from Singapore said it would be unfair on the 470 women who competed in the Asian Games two years ago, and that keeping the 470 was the right thing to do because their investment would be protected. Crikey! With logic like that, no longer we still have classes in the Olympics that date back to the Ark. You've got to change some time!
And by the way, those Asian Games that he refers to. How many women's 470s were competing in Doha in December 2006? Four, apparently. Four! Perhaps if the 29erXX had got in, then they could have sold their secondhand 470s to some men's teams instead? D'ya think? Or maybe all four boats were gelcoated in Barbie pink and therefore worthless to a male secondhand market...
Another Council member noted that these were grave times for the global economy and so change would be expensive. Yes, tell that to the girls who are going to have buy a new Elliott 6. Besides which, there is already a good secondhand market of 29er hulls out there in the world. The conversion to a 29erXX is peanuts by Olympic standards. Being a manufacturer one-design, the campaign costs of a 29erXX would be cheaper than a 470, which offers good value sailing but is still subject to hull and rig development costs.
For the second year running we've seen a good week of progressive discussions hit the crash barriers as ISAF Council squashes a real opportunity for change. Every four years the Olympic Regatta falls further and further behind the modern sailing world as the status quo is allowed to remain. How many more Olympic cycles before the IOC dismisses sailing as an outdated irrelevance with no youth or sex appeal?
Of course, I'm exaggerating. We're not in crisis yet. But did you ever hear that story about the boiling frog?
Question: Was this an opportunity missed? Or were ISAF Council right to stick with the tried and tested 470?