With the Olympics just around the corner, tensions ran high at the Allianz Sailing World Championships
In In between all the other events I’ve attended over the past few months, I didn’t get a chance to update you on the Allianz Sailing World Championships. This is the big event that only happens every four years where all 10 Olympic disciplines contest their Worlds at the same place at the same time. It’s a huge undertaking for any venue, and Scheveningen – the seaside resort near The Hague in The Netherlands – was creaking at the seams when the Olympic bandwagon rolled into town in mid-August.
This event was the first opportunity for sailors to qualify their national spot for next summer’s Olympic Regatta in Marseille, so there was a lot of tension in the air along the sandy beach of Scheveningen. Meanwhile not far away further inland on Lake Braassemermeer [easier to pronounce correctly when you’ve had a few Heinekens] the Para Sailing World Championships were taking place. With four classes of Para competition along with 10 Olympic disciplines, running the event was a massive logistical exercise. The Dutch delivered the event extremely well, aided and abetted by two weeks of almost perfect weather. It rained for about three hours on just one morning in the whole fortnight, the rest of it was almost unbroken blue skies and quite the most amazing sunsets. For the previous two weeks it had been rainy, stormy, autumnal conditions just as it had been in the UK, but it all came good when it mattered. How often can you say that about a sailing regatta!
Not only that but the wind was mostly moderate without being too light or too strong. Either extreme would have been a disaster for the event, as with a 2.5kt tide coursing back and forth through this part of the North Sea, one or other of the classes would have struggled to complete races. Too strong and the standing wind-against-tide waves would have been unyielding tower blocks that would have created pitchpole carnage for the faster high-performance classes. Too light, and the slower boats would barely make ground over the course. Even in 9-10kts of breeze the ILCA 6s and 7s [Laser Radials and Standards in old parlance] were struggling to make way upwind against the adverse current.
There was one particularly log-jammed windward mark rounding where some of the overhead drone shots had 40 or more of the men’s ILCA 7s all battling to get around the mark at the same time. This resulted in multiple collisions with other boats and the mark itself. W
