RYA Council maintains its belief that catamaran racing is an important part of the sport of sailing in the UK, and accepts that the intent of these submissions was not communicated as well as it could have been to relevant stakeholders within the UK sailing fraternity. It believes, nevertheless, that its submissions are important in order to initiate strategic discussions within ISAF, the body responsible for the global direction of the sport and the final arbiter on which events are included at the ISAF Youth World Championships and the Olympic Games.
I comment on this somewhat cautiously... after all the RYA is supposed to represent UK sailors, not me or most of the rest of us catamaran sailors. So I realize that ultimately my opinion really doesn't count for anything. But having said that, for what it's worth...
Their statement is just nauseating. They claim that they erred in not explaining themselves adequately and then (apparently) try to remedy this by "explaining" that "its submissions are important in order to initiate strategic discussion within ISAF".
So they evidently believe there is some issue that needs to be discussed, but instead of having the courage to tell people what that is and maybe what their analysis of the situation is, they choose instead to send what can only be called a coded message by failing to endorse a multihull, keelboat and heavyweight dinghy and giving preferential endorsement to other disciplines.
And this suggestion about "strategic discussions" is nonsense anyhow as far as 2012 is concerned. As I pointed out in my post on the London Games forum, the RYA know very well that the criteria for selecting classes for those games are already locked down. There is no role for strategic discussions.
