Future of Olympic Sailing

A very shortsighted take on the future Olympics which is one of the oldest continual spots dating back to 1900.

Less is more: LA Olympics do not need every sport

Jonathan Liew - With five extra sports at LA 2028, events that feel peripheral, repetitive or involve horses should face the chop. Behold the giant feast. Courses upon courses. Over the past 17 days this has been a city engorged, its every nook and crevice stuffed with sport, to the point where they had to parcel some of it off to the outskirts and even wrap some of it up in a doggy bag and send it to Tahiti.

Are we not sated? As we stagger down the boulevards with a toothpick and a smug burp, trying not to think of the indigestion of Monday morning, the memory of Paris 2024 remains fresh and pristine. This remains the greatest sporting event on Earth, having weathered terrorism, plague, Nazis and the 1904 marathon, when several competitors were chased off the route by dogs and the man who finished first turned out to have had a ride in a car.

As with any lavish meal, the body neatly separates it into the nourishment it needs and the excess matter it does not. The Olympics, to put it a little indelicately, needs to undergo a similar process. There are 48 disciplines across 32 sports at the modern Olympics, if you include all the isotopic variants such as BMX freestyle and rhythmic gymnastics. This is a rise of 41% since the Barcelona Games of 1992, 20% since London 2012. How much is too much?

For successive Games organisers, there is no reasonable answer to this question. This is a beast that must always be fed, must always be devouring and expanding, eating up more of its host cities and more of its citizens’ tax revenues. Which, if you think about it, feels just a little grotesque. Imagine casting an eye over the modern Olympics, in all its greed and grandeur and corruption and waste, and deciding that what it really needs is to become bigger.

Sailing

How many of you own a boat? How many of you could get access to a boat and – checks notes – a sea to sail it in? Of all the many anachronisms at the modern Olympics, sailing is perhaps the most conspicuous of all: a continuing sop to super-rich men who founded the Games and still just really love yachts, basically inaccessible to most of the countries in the world, even the ones with a viable coastline.

But socio-demographics is actually not the biggest issue here. For an event whose defining motif is bringing people together in a place to celebrate sport, sailing is basically extraneous to the whole thing: marooned hundreds of miles away in some well-heeled harbour, basically unwatchable as a spectator sport, liable to be postponed if there is either no wind or too much wind, and with a set of penalty rules indecipherable to all but the most avid boat people, which as we’ve established, you are almost certainly not.

How many of you own a boat? How many of you could get access to a boat and – checks notes – a sea to sail it in? Of all the many anachronisms at the modern Olympics, sailing is perhaps the most conspicuous of all: a continuing sop to super-rich men who founded the Games and still just really love yachts, basically inaccessible to most of the countries in the world, even the ones with a viable coastline.

But socio-demographics is actually not the biggest issue here. For an event whose defining motif is bringing people together in a place to celebrate sport, sailing is basically extraneous to the whole thing: marooned hundreds of miles away in some well-heeled harbour, basically unwatchable as a spectator sport, liable to be postponed if there is either no wind or too much wind, and with a set of penalty rules indecipherable to all but the most avid boat people, which as we’ve established, you are almost certainly not.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/aug/12/paris-olympic-games-la-2028-sports-sailing-golf