Olympic Athletes Survey

Here are some details from that Athletes Commission survey that I mentioned in my last post. Marcelien de Koning presented some of the findings to ISAF at the Conference recently, although as Star call representative Mark Reynolds points out, there are some anomalies in the results, as not all of the Olympic classes received exactly the same version of the questionnaire.

Also, Mark says that some of the questions may have been misunderstood by those for whom English is not their first language, so that needs to be borne in mind too.

There is a question in there about whether the sailors would have wanted a revote on the 11-into-10 medals dilemma which saw the multihull thrown out last year. Of course this is all history now, but it's interesting to see that the majority of sailors would have liked to see a revote, suggesting they weren't happy with the outcome. I thought Mark, as a Star sailor himself, would not have wanted to ask that revote question, although funnily enough he pushed for the question to be included.

click on the image below to see the full-size chart:

Not surprisingly though, the survey reveals that most of Mark's Star colleagues did not want to go digging up the Tornado from its freshly made grave. That's understandable. Mark paraphrased 470 Men's representative, Andreas Kosmotopoulos's apt description: "Why would we want to go back and play another game of Russian roulette where there's one bullet in the chamber for 11 of us?" The Tornado took the bullet 12 months ago, and now we have to wait and see if Goran Petersson could bring the multihull back from the dead, to convince IOC to allow an 11th medal.

Click on the thumbnail below to see the details of the bar chart:

QUESTION: What statistics surprise or interest you from this survey?