Mary to answer your question all the classes are either men’s or women’s disciplines except the Tornado which is “open”. If you look at the classes’ rarely do the men and the women race together. In the 470 after their Olympic win in 2000 Jenny Armstrong and Belinda Stowell did have some top 3 finishes in mixed events and also won a grade 2 event. So in certain conditions and classes women can compete equally with men.

The Tornado with its much higher sheet loads does not lend itself to a mixed combination. At the Seoul Olympics only 2 skippers raced holding the main the other preferred the crew to handle this. One of the 2 was the great Paul Elvstrom sailing with his daughter. While it is very possible that this great sailor would have held the main no matter whom his crew was. By the numbers of non mixed crews racing at the Olympic level has become a farce to call the Multihull discipline as “open”.

If the IOC was honest and concerned about equality they should make the Tornado a male discipline and bring in another discipline that is either forced to be mixed or female. But with the pressure on sailing to reduce their numbers not increase the number of disciplines it seems highly unlikely. Again the multihull fraternity is discriminated against by a policy restricting women into the Olympics. While other claases race as a gender based