George.Morris
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Aug 20, 2008, 6:42 AM
Post #1 of 3
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Sailing an Opponent out of Medal Contention
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Black Flags and Dark Deeds
There are many unsatisfactory aspects of the sport of sailboat racing of which by far the worst is weather. We can do little about the weather except, perhaps, choose sailing venues where the weather is suitable for the sport , but we do have some control over the other unsatisfactory aspects of the sport, one of which is the racing rules. There are many applications of the rules that I dislike but here are two:
a) The Black Flag Disqualification. The idea of the Black Flag is to discourage people from being OCS at the start in big fleets where it is hard to pick out exactly who is over the line and where General Recalls are therefore endemic. Unfortunately, they do not discourage everybody and in all regattas we have the distressing business of good sailors reaching the first mark and being told they have to retire. Could a system not be devised where the offenders are held at the windward mark until all the legal starters have passed, and then released at the back of the fleet? One way of doing this would be to position a committee boat near the windward mark and then require the offenders to sail through the gate between this boat and the windward mark once a suitable flag is lowered, effectively requiring the offenders to restart at the back of the fleet. A disadvantage could be that the new penalty might not discourage enough premature starters and we would be back to the General Recall, but we could give it a try.
b) Sailing someone down the fleet (aka Wilful Obstruction). While sailing inevitably results in some boat-on-boat interactions where one boat uses the rules (or positioning) to gain an advantage, it seems to me that sportsmanship is compromised when the target boat is sailed out of medal contention completely as could have happened to Zach Railly if the race had not been abandoned and did happen to the Swede in the Lasers. Defending your own position is part of our sport but ruining someone else’s race deliberately over a protracted period smells. Contrary to popular myth, the primary purpose of the Rules is to avoid collisions, not to engineer race results. There is a world of difference between covering someone up the last beat to prevent him getting past when you are racing for your place and covering someone out of a race where you are happy to come last. Confining the discussion to medal races under Olympic rules, how could the destruction of the second boat’s chances have been avoided?
The problem only arises when there is only one challenger; where there are two the gold medal contender cannot cover both (at least not at the start of the race). Ironically, this means that someone who is in a comfortable second place is more likely to be match-raced out of it than one who is only two points clear of the third-placed boat (assuming that both are in a position to win gold). The better sailor is thus less likely to get a medal, which can’t be right. Is there scope for some kind of ‘submission’ where the second place boat can concede the gold but then be free to sail his own race for silver? In the Lasers, the Swede needed to come first with Goodison (GBR) last – not very likely. He could have conceded gold, Goodison could have stayed in bed and we could have had a fair race for the silver and bronze. It would go against the concept of a medal race whose aim is to decide the medals on the final day, but it would be fairer.
George Morris
Findhorn, Scotland. (Club level singlehanded dinghy sailor)
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