The King is in the all-together

by Dougal Henshall 12 Oct 00:00 NZDT

A counter view of the never-ending summer of sport or, as the French might say, "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la voile!"

It is amazing how quickly we have all moved on. As we got our jabs and the terrible fears of catching Covid started to recede, it was great to see how quickly life started to bounce back and sailing was very much to the fore in this. Participation levels were up, boat ownership boomed at the end of Covid, and the sun certainly seemed to be shining on sailing.

Now, like so many other boat owners, I had spent the long months of lockdown doing what comes naturally to the sailor ashore... I was dreaming of making one of those exciting longer passages.

However, my dreams were driven on by a hard imperative of reality, as not only were we already looking forwards to an Olympic Regatta down on the Mediterranean at Marseille, but we now had the double boost that just a month later and some 300 sea miles to the south-west, the America's Cup would kick off.

What an opportunity for not just a journalist, but for someone with a lifelong love of sailing and who has a boat... could it be done?

The answer was that not only was the voyage possible, and whilst it would be one of the great trips that can be made on a boat, it wouldn't be one of the 'blue water' passages but instead a 900 or so mile jaunt through the French canals starting up on the Channel coast by Le Harve before finally spilling out into the Med at Port St Louis.

I had recently re-engined my boat, a classic Fairey powerboat, which has become something of an easily recognisable attendee at championships along the UK's South Coast, and with this trip in mind had opted for a pair of new diesels from a French supplier.

Other essentials were added: a proper fridge rather than just a cold box, and a holding tank for the toilet. So once Europe opened up again, I was ready to go.... except that in the end, I didn't.

I had the documentation, the funding, everything that was needed, and yet to my initial sadness, the boat stayed put in the Solent.

It would be easy to blame Brexit for this and the difficulty of the 'maximum 90 days in any 180' rule limiting our time in the Schengen zone (as it would have meant taking the boat down before leaving there to come back home to the UK). I could then run down the clock that counted the days, before returning to the South of France, only to have to repeat the whole exercise once the AC had been concluded.

It was a fine call but in the end, my final decision was made simply because there were so many good and interesting events being held along the South Coast that I could fill a whole summer programme without ever being more than a day's motoring from home.

Just taking the area around Weymouth and Portland as an example, in the space of five weeks the WPNSA hosted the Musto Skiff Worlds, then followed this up with an excellent championships for the lowrider International Moths.

Even as this event was finishing, a bumper gathering of Scorpions were looking forwards to a great week at the superb venue of Castle Cove Sailing Club, before the focus swung back to the Academy with championships for the Topper, then the ILCAs.

This was before various bits of Torbay saw the Int 14s, Contenders and Wayfarers, Chichester Harbour enjoyed the 60th running of their bumper Fed Week (an event that attracted 400 or so boats), Poole got in on the act with the Ospreys...

If you wanted to find a measure of the health of the British domestic sailing scene then the place to be was the central South Coast. Had I wanted to get further afield the Merlin Rockets had gone west, the Solos east and the Phantoms to the north, so without crossing the Channel I was spoilt for choice.

I must make clear here that although I was constantly busy and put in an amazing number of sea miles I didn't make it to all of these events, but from those that I did attend, plus the first person reports I had from others, a theme quickly emerged of tight, competitive racing, an air of excitement afloat and lots of fun being enjoyed ashore.

Better still, I could have all of the above yet still be able to immerse myself in the delights of Marseille and Barcelona, or at least, that was my plan.

First up was the Five Ring Circus, an event that used to be the 'Yachting Olympics' for the simple reason that the medals were competed for in yachts, with a token singlehander to represent the dinghies. Then, as time moved on, the two-man dinghies started to be where it was at (sorry ladies, this wasn't an event for you) before at the peak of the Golden Era in sailing, the 5.5 Metre, Tempest, Soling, Star and Flying Dutchman made way for the 470, Tornado, Laser and 49er to give us the properly titled 'Sailing Olympics'.

With the evergreen Finn to the fore, the Olympics now really meant something to the vast majority of people who race small sailboats and even when World Sailing showed their willingness to compromise the integrity of the sport to the needs of the TV (who can forget the forced placement of the top mark right up under the Nothe Fort headland at Weymouth) this was still something we could all now connect to!

Moving on from some of the more obvious negatives, the media coverage at Weymouth was actually very good and showed the global audience just how good modern sailing can be.

Then came Rio and the gains from 2012 would soon be nullified by some poorly thought through media decision making, that saw the TV cameras focused on a race on the inshore course, where there was an unstable, fickle wind that saw the AP flag more up than down. Meanwhile, on the outer course, the Finns and 470 were engaged in an all-time classic 'thrash' in sunshine, a fresh breeze and huge waves that made for some of the most stunning stills of Olympic sailing... but no TV coverage.

The result of all this was that when World Sailing met for the 'after the Games' postmortem, the bureaucrats who operate in the rarified air of sport administration decided to go 'all in' on making sailing into a fully televisual sport. Out would go the Finn, now the mantra would be 'foiling is the future' with the search being on how many ways could foils be added to the various sailing platforms.

The single biggest point that the decision makers missed is that the biggest pre-requisite for good sailing is decent breeze - without that nothing much is going to happen no matter how many TV cameras you have covering the event. Changing the slate of 'platforms' (many of them are no longer boats) counts for nothing if there's no breeze, but the situation quickly gets worse as - in the search for yet more on screen 'engineered excitement' - the scoring systems are stood on their head to the point that success through the series counts for little with everything resting on a single final race.

It would be not just unfair, but simply wrong to denigrate the on water excellence that resulted in some incredible individual performances at Marseille, yet as the event dragged on with the programme getting ever more skewed by the persistent light airs (light airs on the Southern French Coast in August... who would EVER have guessed that!).

The single reaction to the Regatta was a long yawn! Our domestic TV service had little in the way of coverage, as the rights had gone to one of the US media behemoths, but you could buy in to the platform for a monthly fee (hopefully those that did have now remembered to cancel their subscription).

For those sailors who had been suckered into to buying a month or two of streamed coverage, it wasn't so much that the reporting was pretty naff (and that is being generous on an Olympic scale), it was just that the coverage lacked excitement, as no amount of fevered hyperbole from the presenters could make limply hanging flags and medal races being run in conditions that would have had most of us sat in the bar ashore into an exciting televisual even, no matter what World Sailing might try to make us think.

All this was before the wheels started coming off the Team GBR effort, which saw interest levels waning further as our medal prospects slipped further and further away.

It was such a turn off that not only was I happy to spend the money I'd saved by not taking the subscription instead in a local sailing club bar (let's see... Olympic TV or a Doombar or two... make mine a pint please) but I started to have the first inklings of thoughts that maybe I'd dodged a mega, not to mention mega expensive, bullet by staying in the UK.

Instead, I had the delights of Portland Harbour in some of the best weather from the whole of an otherwise all too often miserable summer. Yes, the breezes were light, just as with the Olympics races were lost to a lack of wind but Castle Cove in the sunshine was relaxed, chilled (even in the heat) yet delivered some amazing racing.

With the light breezes RO for the event Simon Hawkes (those who know Simon know he takes a bit of a blow to get shifting) brought the fleet back inside the harbour where at least there was some wind and still got well managed gate starts and good-sized beats. The Scorpion fleet responded by fiercely competing for just about every place, wherever you looked there were boats overlapped: in one race I'd sat up at the windward mark and I'd say that 75% of the fleet had rounded before you started to get the gaps appearing.

New boats, old boats, FRP and woodies were all mixed up in a glorious celebration of domestic one-design dinghy sailing.

Those classes with sub-25 boat fleets (a good starting point, as it is half of the old Y&Y benchmark of boats that made the '50+ Club') could well do with spending some time looking at fleets such as the Scorpion and Europe, as they've shown that long term decline is not an inevitable part of ageing. But full marks once again to the Scorpion Class as a whole, they saw the long grass at the back of the dinghy park and came up with an amazing response that has put them right up in the big league with only the RS200 (in terms of two-person boats) doing better.

Sadly, for the Scorpions, who (like their RO) enjoy a good blow, the best of the weather down in Portland Harbour was enjoyed a few days earlier by the Lowrider Moths, with their fleet including some of the semi-circular hulled light airs flyers who had made it across from France. On one afternoon, when the weather station down on the harbour wall clicked over the 25kt windspeed mark one might have expected some of these older, decidedly tippy boats to head back to the Academy slipway, but this too is a fleet that is bucking a number of current negative trends.

With first sight of the new FRP Magnum 6 hulls from Ian Ridge on display ashore the Lowriders, who had taken a calculated risk by heading to Portland, have put themselves onto more solid ground looking ahead.

Watching these two classes, plus the Musto Skiffs, Toppers and ILCAs that also made their way to Weymouth, gave the observer a great feeling of the ongoing vibrancy in domestic sailing and highlight the relevance to our sport of a well-run championship.

This issue of relevance really hit home hard when coverage started of the second super media-focused water-based event of the summer kicked off, the America's Cup down in beautiful Barcelona.

Now in all fairness I ought to admit that I know the city a bit - I was based there for a while for work and loved it - so the lure of watching the AC yachts there was really bringing on the blues, leaving me thinking that I could have been there, indeed, I should have been there.

Then the racing started, bringing with it a dawning realisation that to paraphrase a crusty old General Bosquet watching the Charge of the Light Brigade, "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la voile" (or in journalistic terms, "it's magnificent but it ain't sailing"). In short, a brilliant effort but ultimately, pointless!

Once again one can point to the weather, if 50kt foiling boats are stuck glued to the surface of the water then that's a media fail and even for the interested spectator's viewpoint, as the wind got lighter, the boats, which can foil in winds that are still in single figures, ended up almost reaching back and forth across the computer controlled box, from boundary to boundary in a desperate attempt to maintain the speed needed to not just foil, but to make the gybes needed to send them back the other way.

On a number of occasions, the notion of tactical match racing ended up coming a distant second to the essential requirement to not 'fall off the foils' (but hey, this is the AC, I thought that there was no second place in this set up). And please don't get me started on the powerboats having to tow the boats to get them foiling before casting them off.

Then, hallelujah, there was some breeze, and one has to admit that the boats are certainly impressive, but the General Bosquet quote again came to mind when there was a feeble attempt at what most informed people would understand as match racing. The two boats were hammering in from the opposite sides of the 'box' and looked to be meeting in a classic port and starboard. This alone was enough to grab my interest and I enjoyed a moment of rules induced pleasure as boat A, which was holding a marginal advantage went for the slam dunk tack almost bang on the course line of boat B.

Given that in the moments before the tack both boats were doing in excess of 35kt, this was a manoeuvre that called for exquisite timing and execution. Literally a second either way and this could either have been a penalty for tacking too close or a very expensive and potentially regatta ending coming together that would have probably ended up in the courts as much as the protest room.

But then yet more excitement appeared on screen as the boat now clear astern went for the equally classic defence against this move. They cracked sheets a fraction and dived down to leeward, using the boost in speed to slingshot themselves up into an aggressive lee bow position... only for the on-water umpires to call this as a penalty. These AC boats are so fragile they need an exclusion zone around them, something that all but negates anything in the way of close quarter action that we might recognise as match racing.

That one moment aside, the rest of the action was one long snoozefest. All boats had to do was win the start, get to the favoured side, control the first beat and not fall off the foils.

The coverage wasn't helped by some pretty inane commentary, as when INEOS Britannia surrendered a potentially winning position. "They're now the hunters" we were told breathlessly, "Ben's hunting down the opposition," when the timings at the gates showed a widening gap and the on-screen graphics revealed the distance between the two boats steadily increasing rather than the decrease that would have come from being 'hunted down'.

About the only bit of real excitement came as a thunderstorm rolled across the course, unleashing a massive thunderbolt into the water ahead of one of the competitors, my only question was how one of the helms managed to limit his response to a single word that was nothing more than a fairly mild breach of broadcasting standards; had it been me on the helm at the time the commentators would be apologising for me still!

The racing is boring, and the boats are even worse. There's nothing and no-one visible except the tops of some crash helmets; everything else takes place away out of sight.

You don't get sail changes and even the well-informed might struggle to catch the adjustments in trim, as the mainsail chord is deepened to generate more low-down power (falling off the foils time might be getting close). There is, put bluntly, nothing to see.

My mind kept going back to the 1987 AC series down at Perth, when in big winds and waves the crews literally sweat blood to drive their boats to the limit. You could watch the intense efforts of the grinders at the pedestal winches, then the crew frantically heaving on sheets trying to pacify a flogging spinnaker during a tricky gybe.

The whole point here is that these were actions that we could all relate too, from the helm at the wheel, intently watching the slot between the main and the genoa, to the foredeck crew hanging on whilst preparing for a hoist or a drop, or a change of foresail.

Even someone who has never sailed anything bigger than a GP14 could watch, understand and then thank their lucky stars that they sail (like so many today) on an inland stretch of water where 300m is a long beat!

By now I'd had my lightbulb moment, and the reality was written large in the debris-strewn waters at Barcelona. I had missed out on nothing, instead I'd seen event after event back at home that all championed the brilliant fun there is to be had (and for many, with no more than a quite modest outlay) in our sailboat racing at grassroots level.

Had I gone to Marseille, then on to Barcelona, I'd have been bitterly disappointed, bored stiff with following two uninspiring events that are only feeding the limited but major interests that demand them. But there is an even more important aspect to all of this.

The relevance to our own sport is essentially nil, except in the ways in which these two global media extravaganzas suck interest and resource away from a home-based activity which for most of its existence has all be about participation for everyone.

It wasn't about the money behind feelings that I'd have resented the trip down to the Mediterranean, but more about how I'd have been presented with two events that would have offered me nothing to write about, plus I'd have missed the lion's share of two domestic seasons, which even in the mainly naff summer that we've endured in 2024 have still shown that the heart of our domestic scene is beating strongly.

Best of all is the news that next year could be even better, with events from Cornwall to Essex already in the calendar, a Worlds at Weymouth (the Flying 15s) and strong rumours that the glory days will still be there in 2026 with the news that the 5o5s may be returning to the hallowed waters of Hayling for their Worlds.

Meanwhile, the rumours continue as to the long-term future for sailing in the Olympics, as the media demands see them getting ever further away from being held in the sort of boats that represent what the majority of us do at the weekend.

There also has to be a concern that after the relative failure of Team GBR (in terms of investment against returns, as expressed by cost per medals won - surely the only metric that counts in an Olympic programme) that our domestic sport will be even further marginalised, as the RYA seek to funnel even more funding into elite programmes at the expense of that essential commodity - adult grassroots sailing.

And as for the AC, how much longer can the incredible levels of investment needed to even get afloat at the event be sustained for what in the end are only questionable media engagements. Together, these two supposed 'headline events' represent little more than the Hans Christian Andersen folktale about the Emperor's New Clothes, in which an elite coterie promote ever more fanciful claims about how wonderful things are, when the reality is that there is nothing there, instead they are truly a victory of marketing style over the reality that even the most myopic of sailors can see is not there.

The advice therefore has to accept that sailing will never be televisual, so let's all ignore the boring antics of a few and not just spectate, but participate, at whatever bit of water floats your boat. In the end it is much more fun, it is real and you don't have to schlep all the way to the Mediterranean to enjoy it!

One of the ongoing themes in my articles is on how the cost of sailing is outstripping the inflationary pressures found elsewhere in life and it is certainly the case that in little more than a month, more than half a billion pounds worth of exquisite hardware will have been found wanting. So here's a radical idea. Take sailing out of the Olympics, ditch the AC and put boating back where it should be - as an accessible pastime/sport for all.

As of October 2024, when this article was being finished off, INEOS Britannia had just won their way through against the Italians, so that for the first time in 64 years, a British boat is competing for the Cup. This is an amazing achievement and a just reward for all those years of work and training, and I hope with everything that I have that Ainslie's get the ultimate success they so richly deserve.

This though doesn't change the opinions expressed here! Remember: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la voile"