I have looked at the situation of sailing being included in the Olympic games, in general, and cats in particular, now for over 50 years, and I have to say that opinions that I formed and that I felt comfortable with all those years ago, still feel just as comfortable today.
It has always been my opinion that the Olympic organisers think of sailing either as, a necessary evil, or an inconvenience, or something that they wish would just go away and disappear, or at best some sort of tatty little freak side show tagging onto the coat strings of the MAIN event(s), something that very few people are interested in and that is problematic, at best, to organise and control. Today that is compounded as the IOC find it almost impossible to “sell” sailing as a media friendly event for anything any where nearly as profitable as they sell other events for.
I have always found it just a little strange that “way back” in the dim dark ages when sailing first appeared as an event within the “games”, that there wasn’t any movement from within sailing organizations to keep sailing separate from the Olympic games and instead formulate, and run their own “Olympic” games just for sailing. This always seemed to me to be the logical way FOR THE BENEFIT OF OUR SPORT. After all this is exactly what has happened to the winter Olympics and they certainly have not suffered from this separation.
Why does sailing feel that it needs the Olympic games? Sailing has always been more than competent in organising and running a multitude of “world” events without any assistance from the IOC (as well as the ISAF), In fact I would argue that the IOC and particularly the ISAF have held sailing back more than they have assisted it (not to mention the draconian control DEMANDED and profit bleeding from the sport by the ISAF)
Do we really need any of them?