Personally I'm more of the side "why not" then "why" in this respect and agree with John here. Lets make mixed multi sailing the most exiting sailing event in the Olympics ! It's gotta beat heavy men dinghy sailing with ease as a spectator sport !

I say this is an opportunity that we must leverage with all our might. Perferable to a final result where both men and women have a multi event. I feel that alot of other posters are just vinegar pissers because their preferred setup is not high on the equipment listing. Tough luck guys, you should have worked harder on the design or on building a viable class.

Personally, I feel nothing fundamentally wrong with mixed teams, hell, I would even liked to see that ! Seriously. I think it can introduce a new dimension to sports in general. Don't we have mixed doubles in tennis for example ? Also, it increases the pool of potential sailors by theoretically 2 ! Not in the beginning of course but after a several years of good promo ? Aren't we complianing about the decline of sailing ? Well, opening up the sport to the other half of the populus can't really be a bad thing, can it ?

Of course then we get the usual BS about a 16 footer being a toy compared to the manly man 20 footers, bla, bla, bla. How a 16 footer will sink with two heavy weights on it, but the Olympics aren't really about beer belly overweights are they ? They are about trimmed-down athletic young people right ? How many 90kg version will there be of those ? Or are we putting Mike Tyson kind of persons on sail craft now ? Of course, we also get the "slow as hell" argument when for example the F16's are ONLY 15% slower around the course then the overhyped Nacra carbon 20. Yep, you got that right, a full 15% (5 min per race)! Never mind that (even) the 16's beat the 49-er skiff (another overhyped class) by a 20% margin already. My point being here that pretty much any catamaran design (including the H16's) will beat ALL OTHER SAILING OLYMPIC CLASSES hands down anyway. In fact, the F16's beat ALL OTHER types of sailboats (incl. moth foilers, 14 and 16 foot skiffs, with 18's being equal at best) around the course, save a handful of larger cats (M20, Tornado (only 10% faster), Nacra 20C, plus a few one-offs or prototypes). And that most definately includes light winds. How can that ever be bad ? You yourself, celebrated the Nacra 17 (gets beaten by F16) as a good option a short while ago ? I'm sure you also know the meaning of the expression "Double standard".


No I say that some of us here are focussing to much on the negative and don't see the opportunities that John tries to explain to us.

Start out mixed and make that work then work to get a second (mens) multi included while keeping the current choice as the womens multi. Like a two-stage rocket. Seems like the best approach given the situation to me. The 5/5 directly would be better but that is simply not in the cards at this time.

So we've got to use what we've got and get some results first.

Regards,

Wouter