Picturing the Course
Hello sailors and sailing fans,
Before the big debate at the AGM I wanted to post a couple of diagrams to outline how the class and sailors can be in control of how ‘extreme’ the change needs to be, even within the ‘theater style’ concept.
First, lets look at the current course.
So without changing any racing we currently do, we could put in lane ropes from where boats could safely watch, but no interfere at all. By design, this would be a poor experience for the fan. Few boats manage to pull off a 2 tack beat to the corner of the race course, so by design, most of the time, most of the boats would be at least 400m away.
Now look at what happens with a restriction, note in this case, a 2 tack beat is still possible.
In this case, the fans are significantly closer to the action at all times. Instead of being more than 400m away from all the boats, they are a maximum of 400m away from all the boats, and significantly closer most of the time. As well, the sailors are not overly interrupted, even sailors aiming for a 2 tack beat probably end up doing more.
An now we take a look at the standard 4 tack beat.
Here the benefits to the spectator really start paying off. They are a maximum of 200m away, and have double the number of ’close’ encounters. The sailor have their leverage significantly diminished, but still do a fairly standard 4 tack beat.
The above would be the minimum that would seem to make sense for the ‘theater style’ racing to make a difference. In breeze, the 4 tack beat would be manageable for all, and still give the spectator a seat near the action.
In more moderate breeze, the fans may get even closer by scaling the course down (shortening distance to the top mark, and pro rata the width) and/or moving the aspect ratio even higher, forcing more maneuvers. As the sailors try these courses out it should become fairly obvious at what numbers of boats what aspect ratio and lengths (by time taken) work best.
regards,
Ben
Ben asked me to tell why i am not convinced of the theatre racing mode.
I think sailing is by nature a sport that is hard to show live to competitors. I think that it is best to use tv images tv and web broadcasting to show live or redistributed images of the sport. I ask myself this: who will actually come out on the water to look at the racing?
Like happened in the Bahamas World or at the Medemblik World Cup 2010 is really great. Images from on the water put on the web. Live is great but even after the racing when you already know who will win it is still nice to be able to see what really hapened on the water.
It should be perfectionised, but with cameras and a small crew we can do really a lot more without touching at the sport itself I believe.
I think you could maybe make a paying site or something, you know to look at all the races of World Cups, Worlds Europeans etc.
I really think this is the only way we can get sailing in the picture. All the other ideas are nice, but they don’t take into account that you have to be able to be at the racing venue and go out with a rib on the water and see the racing. Maybe the theater style is nice to replace medal race with few stages like proposed but not for entire finals.