Optimist, Open Skiff, Youth & Olympic Sailing Blog

The RS Tera - one of the alternatives to the Optimist This is a response to a comment, on a FB group, summarizing the conventional view that only the Optimist is the truly worthy pathway for youth sailors aged say 10 to 15, and that the other classes are mere "spin-off classes offering a home to those not at the front end of the Optimist circuit." I think that things are much more complex than that regarding U16 youth sailing. Conventional thinking is that the Optimist is the best / only worthy path. It’s the naïve approach that many people, many parents, many clubs, many federations, fall for, not knowing the details about what competitive Optimist sailing is. The reality is that it is extremely difficult to develop top Optimist sailors. For several reasons. First the boat is complex, unnecessarily complex for boys and girls being 10,11 and 12, and who spend considerable amount of time learning for example how to rig the sail, adjust the sail ties, etc. All of this i...

Here are the top stories of the year 2018 from our blog. This is by no means a comprehensive review of the year 2018 - in part because a number of events are only discussed in our Facebook Group and not in our blog. Yet the year 2018 was clearly marked by controversies surrounding Olympic sailing and their direct implications for youth sailing. With lots of action and substantial regatta participation in classes such as the Optimist, the Open Bic, the 4.7, the Radial and the 29er, youth sailing is not on the decline. Record participation level in events such as the Optimist Garda meeting, with some 1,300 sailors, shows that (conventional) youth sailing is still progressing, despite the rise of much faster platforms such as kiteboarding. Yet, the controversies arising from the selection of equipments and events for the 2024 Olympics have shed a huge cloud over competitive dinghy sailing. First, light weight female sailors will continue to have very few participation options, despite...

RS Feva: Endorsed by the Fédération française de voile, the Royal Yachting Association, among other sailing federations We all know about conventional youth sailing, with the Optimist, the 420, the Laser, sometimes the 29er. But we all know too that youth sailing is in trouble in many many clubs around the world. Solutions exist, and they are being tried in various locations. A key is to diversify the equipments, particularly for sailors below age 15.  It's critical to provide more opportunities, to accomodate a wide range of physiques and weights, to address the desire of some sailors to do double-handed rather than single-handed sailing, and to provide more opportunities for learning core sailing skills through the diversity of platforms. Some countries are making substantial efforts in that direction. For example, the first video features the 2018 French national championships for sailors under 15 - and the variety of equipments is significant. It includes several...

Sean Herbert, at a 2015 World Cup event in Australia Below are statistics of the recent 2017 worlds held in Italy, for the U17 category, which brought together some 67 competitors (there were 65 competitors in the U13 category). Italy: 23 sailors (championship held in Italy) France: 13 sailors Germany: 6 sailors Australia: 6 sailors New Zealand: 5 sailors (including the World Champion) USA: 4 sailors Spain: 3 sailors Japan: 2 sailors (including the silver medalist and first girl) Denmark: 2 sailors (including the Bronze medalist) Switzerland: 1 sailor Poland: 1 sailor Source: http://worlds2017.openbicclass.org/results Clearly, this is limited participation in the Open Bic champs, compared to the Optimist worlds, where selection for the 5 slots available for each country is very hard to achieve. Yet, competition there is in the Open Bic Class, When one checks participation in previous international events, the trend is however clear. There is increasingly high leve...