Here is another report from Jill Nickerson at the European Championships. This is pretty terrifying!

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From Jill Nickerson
Suncoast Sailing Campaign

In the pre race day of the European Championships tragedy strikes the Tornado Fleet. During the practice race, the German team of Jo Jo Polgar and Andrew Landenberger were practically killed and their boat destroyed after one of the race committee boats hit them broadside and RAN OVER them.

The accident happened half way up the first windward leg. A race committee boat was taking pictures of the Australian team going up wind when they suddenly turned off, and sped broadside into, and over the German Tornado. The boat hit the German team from the leeward side at a 90 degree angle while the team were both trapped out on the wire. The power boat proceeded to go right thru them, the boom, the sails and the mast before coming to rest on the windward hull (the hull on the opposite side of where they hit). Jo Jo, crew on the boat, said "we were yelling and yelling at the boat while it was going in the same direction, about 20 meters away, as they were far too close, then all of a sudden, they went even faster, turned, and came right at us". Both of the team members went flying and Andrew grabbed Jo Jo and tried to cling on to the rudder of the Tornado to try and protect themselves against the high speed propeller of the motor boat. Andrew ended up dislocating his shoulder and the two fortunately suffered only minor cuts and bruises. The only thing both Andrew and Jo Jo could keep saying was it was unbelievable to think that someone involved in the race could be so careless.

After the collision, the 3 people in the powerboat were a bit in shock as they tried to sort the pieces out. A second boat came to the rescue of the two boats. It took quite a while to get the wreckage under control where they could be towed in. Once into the beach, Andrew was able to pop his shoulder back into place with some help and work was frantically begun to try and salvage the wreckage and put a boat back together for the start of the first race in the morning at 12PM. It will be a race against time as there is much work to do. The hull will need to be repaired, mast replaced and re rigged, boom built and re rigged, sails dramatically repaired, since the power boat went thru the window of the main sail and wounds healed.

The driver was unavailable for comment but I do not think he will be operating a vehicle during the race. The police came to the boat park but with the language issues, we are not sure if this was related to this incident.

Michael Grandfield, class president, was quite disturbed and was last seen heading to the race office to have a bit of a chat, to say the least, to address this issue as well as the issue of multiple power boats on the course.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident in this fleet as well as other fleets. The 2002 Pre Olympic test event was marked with tragedy when a US wind surfer was hit by a power boat and very seriously injured. She has still not totally recovered and her Olympic dreams crushed. The 2003 Miami Olympic Classes regatta had a tourist cigarette speed boat, fly thru the course and run over the back of Roman Hagara, 2000 Olympic Tornado Gold Medalist, fortunately not resulting in any bodily injury, but damaging the boat. In one of the most tragic collisions, Brazilian Tornado sailor Lars Grail was struck by a speed boat during a training session and had his leg severed just below the hip, nearly killing him and ending his chance at a Gold medal at the 2000 games.

We hope this is the last tragedy we have to report from this or any other event, but hope that stories like this one, drive the point home to regatta organizers how serious race management needs to be. It is imperative to have responsible and knowledgeable race committee on the water to serve and protect the racers on the water. It is very important to have a clear understanding of the speed and closing speeds of the boats on the course and be able to anticipate movement if you are doing race committee work with in the course.

Best regards,
Jill Nickerson
Suncoast Sailing Campaign