2018 Canadian Optimist Summer Regatta Calendar: a Critique
The two main Canadian events are CORK and the Canadian championships.
The dates for the CORK International Optimist Regatta, held yearly in Kingston, ON, have been announced long ago - they are August 9-12 2018.
After multiple changes, the dates for the Canadian championships, to be held in Squamish, BC, will be as follows:
- CODA Clinic: August 13-16 2018
- Regatta: August 17-23 2018
These dates are 1 day earlier than the dates that were presented and agreed upon at the CODA General Assembly in Halifax, NS, in August 2017 - something that does not make any significant difference regarding the scheduling issues for the kids participating in the Worlds (see details below)
Note that at the CODA General Assembly, nobody paid attention to the precise dates of the Worlds, and the scheduling conflict issue was not addressed. This is because the athletes to represent Canada at the worlds had not yet been selected, and also because there was a general trust in what CODA was doing.
With the substantial travel between Kingston and Squamish, it will be impossible for athletes participating in the CORK event to attend the clinic in Squamish! They will miss at least a day, but more realistically will not even participate, because after a major event like CORK, 2 days of rest are typically needed to recover.
So there is an obvious conflict between these two events - and this would be perfectly preventable with good planning. Why is CODA putting its 2 main events of the season in conflict with each other? But that's not all ...
Another issue is the conflict between the Worlds and the Canadian championships. The worlds are to be held in Cyprus from August 27 to September 6. Cyprus is 10 time zones away from BC, which requires, according to the athletic / coaching academic litterature, 10 days of adaptation, after travel, for the athletes to recover and to be able to compete without being tired.
Unfortunately, the dates for the Canadian championships make it impossible for the five athletes attending the Worlds to schedule both events in their regatta calendar, without substantial risks of heavily suffering from jet lag while at the Worlds.
The maths don't add up. There is no way to fit a sufficient, safe, recovery time between the two events. This issue has been explained at lenghts to CODA, but they have decided to maintain their schedule. CODA has attempted to organize the Canadians a bit earlier, which would have helped a bit, but after deliberations of their executive (no minutes, just informal discussions over the phone), they have decided to revert, by one day, to their initial schedule.
To make things worse, the CODA schedule prevents world-selected athletes participating in the Canadians from participating in the Worlds official pre-event -- the Optimist Mediterranean Championship to be held from August 21st to August 25th 2018 at the same venue as the Worlds. That's the event that most sailors competing at the worlds will use for getting used to the local conditions in Cyprus -- an opportunity denied to the sailors attending the Canadians in Squamish.
Clearly, CODA is not preoccupied by the well-being and performance of Canada's elite athletes at the Worlds. It's like living a fatality: Canadians are never really good at the worlds, so why bother?
And to add insult to injury, CODA has decided to exclude from the 2019 IODA events, including the 2019 Worlds, the athletes that are not achieving their selection through the 2018 Canadian championships (which serve as trials for the 2019 IODA events) - this CODA does being perfectly aware of the obvious scheduling conflict.
So athletes and their parents are facing an impossible choice, that CODA has imposed without any respect for the elite athletes selected for the 2018 worlds and who can still compete in 2019 in the Opti class. Either they go to the Canadians, compete, and are in a position to achieve selection for the 2019 IODA events, but they will most likely underperform and have potentially a miserable, frustrating experience, at the 2018 Worlds because of the heavy jet lag.
Or they decide to skip the Canadians, to avoid the heavy jet lag and to prepare well locally for the Worlds, through the official pre-event, and they are excluded from all IODA events in 2019! Even if they are among the best in the country! CODA does not care about this. Actually, CODA is 100% responsible of this nonsensical situation.
As two out of the 5 athletes of the 2018 Worlds Canadians Team will age out of the Optimist in 2019, there are three athletes who are put into that situation by CODA. Many solutions to avoid this have been presented to CODA -- all have been rejected.
In summary, the 2018 Canadian Optimist schedule is NOT well planned, discriminates against the East Coast athletes (who will not be able to combine CORK and the CODA clinic prior to the Canadian championships - a clinic that is really needed to adapt to the typically windy and cold local conditions) and discriminates against the athletes of the 2018 Canadian Worlds Team!
This is mismanagement by an organization that has done lots of good work in the past - mismanagement that is perfectly avoidable - but that's the situation as of the time of writing this blog post.
CODA is very unfortunately firm in its decision to maintain this ill conceived schedule and related selection process for the 2019 IODA events.
To be noted is that CODA is unfortunately largely unaccountable as an organization, and the IODA seems unfortunately to have no mandate to intervene in the mismanagement at the level of a national organization, even when such a national organization has as a key mandate to represent IODA at the national level and to operate the selection of athletes for IODA events, including the Worlds.
To be noted also is that Sail Canada, which is Canada's National Sailing Authority, does not have any authority over CODA! Ultimately, Canada's minister of sports in accountable for Sail Canada. But for CODA, such accountability does not exist.
There is a bigger picture issue at stake here: as most elite athletes in Canada go through the Optimist, including most present and future Olympians, it is high time to bring profound changes to the governance of the Optimist Class in Canada. Obviously, the present system, which is totally dependent on the omnipotent and unaccountable CODA, is not serving sailors well and is most unlikely to reform itself from the inside.
