Acat230,


What you are doing is called "bootstrapping".


You justify that the named A-cat skippers are very good in general (over all classes) by naming how many times they won an A-cat event.

When a sailor wins his class event then it only says something about his relative skill compared to the other crews in the class. It does not say anything about his skills in absolute sense.

Lets forget about any dinghy wins also. I have yet to see a dinghy champion to make quick and succesful transition to a catamaran. The two designs are just extremely different in how they need to be handled. Rig tuning is completely different, can't tack on shifts easily enough and the speeds are so much higher that correct sail trim is much more critical.

What I mean here is that you can grasp the 49-er world champion and put him on a tornado and they will come last in any international Tornado event. That is has much dinghy experience helps racing cats. And that applies the otherway around as well.

So what are we left with here ?





So his skills come from sailing Tornado's and not A-cats. These Tornado skills should be more then sufficient to win him a slot through either the Olympic boat slot or his area qualifier slot. No point in awarding him a third slot through the A-cat class.





nothing besides A-cat class wins





Which F18HT north americans was that, the one with 7 or 8 boats participating ? By this standard any cat class can claim a slots. And there are many more 3rd spot (or any other spot like 2nd) Alter Cup crews over the past years. Only the WINNER of the Alter Cup gets to return. All others have the fight to win back their slot.





nothing besides A-cat class wins





nothing besides A-cat class wins unless you really want to count his youth class win of about 20 years ago.




I don't think anyone said that. Apart from you that is.

If anything your summary shows that the best of the US A-cats sailors have trouble winning anything other the A-cat races. Should therefor the A-cat class be given a reserved slot for each annual Alter Cup event ?

If this is still your claim then that is hardly reasonable or fair, is it ?

And if these A-cat skippers are so good anyway, why couldn't they win their own area qualifiers ? Just like Charley Ogletree and Ken Marschack did, sailing an A-cat?

Or didn't these sailors you name even bother to participate in their area qualifier ? If so then why should they be given a slot to the Alter Cup event anyway ? Try explaining that to the other sailors who actually did put in alot of effort and raced hard to win a slot.

Wouter