Good news, but also a lot of bad news, for sailors who want to see a re-vote of the slate of 10 sailing Events being lined up for the Olympic Regatta in Weymouth 2012.

If you’ve been following this blog since last October, you’ll be familiar with the whole Estoril saga, where the Men’s Keelboat won a narrow victory over the Multihull, and the Women’s Match Racing just edged out the Women’s Skiff. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, dig back through the SailJuice archives for October and November 2007.)

SailJuice was not a fan of either of these outcomes, and reported on the eleventh-hour change in voting procedure, a cunning move that was led by Charley Cook from US Sailing, whose agenda was to see the keelboats remain in the Games. (Fair play to you, by the way, Charley. I don’t agree with what you did, but you were there to do a job for your country.)

The Royal Yachting Association has since led a campaign to get the voting re-opened, and made a submission to ISAF to have a revote take place at the mid-year meeting. Last week the ISAF Executive Committee sat down in Switzerland to discuss what ‘urgent’ matters should be discussed at the mid-year meeting which takes place in Qingdao this May.

Most of the urgent matters were over relatively trivial issues, but the one that engaged them a bit more was the RYA’s submission. The Exec referred the matter to ISAF Constitution Committee (chaired by David Lees and vice-chaired by a certain Charley Cook) to get a definition of ‘urgent’. The Constitution Committee debated, did not come to a unanimous conclusion, but ultimately deemed the RYA’s submission as non-urgent.

When SailJuice spoke to Rod Carr at the end of last week – before he had had a chance to speak to ISAF – he was perplexed, to put it mildly. “We’re non-plussed by the decision not to consider these matters urgent. By November we believe it will be too late to change, so how could you consider it not urgent? I’m not a lawyer, this is just common sense.”

The reason for Rod being non-plussed was that he was under the impression that the International Olympic Committee was expecting ISAF to send in the final list of 2012 Event for IOC approval and rubber-stamping within the next few weeks. So for ISAF to pronounce this issue as non-urgent and shoving the submission back to November would mean the 10 Events were already set in stone. It was a two-fingered salute by ISAF to the RYA, and anyone else who felt short-changed by the voting in Estoril.

So you can understand why Rod was a little vexed by this state of affairs.

Things improved the following week however, when Rod had a chance to speak to Jerome Pels, the newly installed ISAF Secretary General. Apparently there is still room and time for discussion after all, as Rod explained: “Everyone was assuming that both the details of Events and Equipment had to be submitted to the IOC by this year. ISAF has clarified this with the IOC and apparently this is not the case.”

So, it is still possible for the Events slate to be debated and even revoted at this November’s AGM.

A sigh of relief from Rod Carr then? Er, no, not really. “We think it [the vote last November] is a bad decision and that the proposal to reconsider these matters should still be considered urgent.”

Rod’s concern is that by the next AGM, any momentum for turning over the Estoril decision will be long gone. “By this November, many people will have kicked this issue into the long grass. They will have got over their shock and anger that they had when the decision was first announced, and increasingly people will say, ‘Oh well, never mind, let’s get on with what we’ve got.’”

To give you an example of what will happen before then, Rod believes that the RYA will have been forced to close down any funding for its younger sailors on the Olympic Development Programme. “We can’t justify paying out money for sailors on the off-chance that we might get a change of Olympic Events,” says Rod.

The RYA has stuck its neck out on this issue, but not before doing a lot of consulting with other national sailing authorities behind the scenes, to gauge the mood. Sufficiently buoyed by the offers of support, the RYA fired off its salvo against this decision at the end of last year. Yachting Australia has been another vocal opponent to the Estoril decision, and to a lesser extent the French federation, the FFV (although they seem to want to keep the multihull AND the keelboat, without seeming to offer much solution to the 11-into-10-doesn’t-go problem).

But Rod is wondering where the rest of the rebel uprising has gone. “We’ve done our bit, where are the rest? They’re saying things in private, and being very supportive behind the scenes. But talk is cheap. We’ve had our say, the Australians, the French and a few others have had their say about things. Now, if other people want something to change, then they need to speak out and make their case to ISAF.”

With November, rather than May, now being the last opportunity to debate the Olympic slate, ISAF is open to submissions until 1 August. But Rod says that is too late. He wants to see other nations nail their colours to the mast now.

“We’ve got a stretching target to get two-thirds – that’s 26 people - of the delegates to vote, to change last November’s decisions. The Austrians, Danes, UK, Australia, France, New Zealand are all on the record as wanting a vote.” Now it’s time for others to step up, he says.

Rod wants some of the smaller nations to follow their lead. “Let’s say you were one of the smaller nations, and you’re thinking, ‘do I need to put in a submission?’. You’re worried about the slate as it stands, so you say to yourself, ‘One of the big nations will put in a submission, and I’ll vote for that.’”

That won’t be good enough, says Rod. “You could say the Executive are well within their rights to leave things as they are. If only four or five nations put in a submission, it’s easy for them to tell themselves that ISAF represents more than a hundred nations, so there’s no big furore here.”

Indeed, when I spoke to Jerome Pels about this issue a couple of days ago, he made that very point, that from the ISAF perspective they see a lot of complaint at grass roots level but not much complaint from national authorities other than the RYA and Yachting Australia.

There is more to this, and I’ll come back to you with more detail from my conversation with Jerome in the next few days, but that should be enough for you to chew on for the time being.

A few months have passed since we discussed this issue. But it seems like a good time to reassess things again, particularly as the Tornado Worlds are going on in New Zealand right now. What’s your view? Do you think the RYA should quit yapping and let bygones be bygones? Or should Rod and his band of rebels continue to battle all the way through to this November?