ISAF throws a bomb

by Rob Kothe and the Sail-World Team on 14 Oct 2013 The Sailing World Cup 2013 in Melbourne is coming up fast, it runs from Dec 1st to 9th with the first round of entries closing at the end of October.

Event Director Mark Turnbull says, ‘Entries are up strongly as this stage, with more support than ever coming from the State Squads.

We will be on the water for Sail Melbourne, watching the Olympic and Invited classes, along with Richard Gladwell who is coming over from Auckland to help us cover the myriad of classes racing at this big event.'

Looking ahead, as one of the most colourful of the EUROSAF Vice Presidents said to me today at the Semaine Olympique Francaise regatta, ISAF has thrown a bomb onto the Sailing World Cup scene.

He called it a bomb, we'd called it a Revolution (We have published both the executive summary and 35 page Presentation- so of you have any interest in high performance sailing you should look carefully at the ISAF proposal)

ISAF President Carlo Croce will be leading the debate on the ISAF proposal to revamp the Olympic Class events, at the ISAF Annual Conference in Oman in a months time.

Seeking a European reaction, we sat down with EUROSAF's Marco Predieri, the President of the 44 nation European Sailing Federation who believes the new ISAF proposal will advance Olympic class events not just in Europe but in the America's, Oceania and Asia. We will publish that interview in the next few days and we will be seeking reaction from Australia, New Zealand and US Sailing peak bodies this week.

Been watching Australian Laser sailor Ashly Brunning, currently ranked sixth in the world, competing here in La Rochelle. At one stage he was second but fell back to fifth after today's medal race, but stil managed to keep Nick Thompson, the British champion behind him. Next month the Laser World Championship will be sailed in Oman and with four Australian sailors, Tom Burton, Ryan Palk, Matt Wearn, in the top ten Laser rankings, it will be an interesting
regatta.

The 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race took a major step forward earlier this week with the sea trialling and first major sail of a VO65 - with the all womens team Team SCA taking delivery of the first boat, and sailing to their base in Lanzarote, in France.

In this edition of Sail-World.com’s newsletter we feature several galleries of images of the VO65 sailing hard in fresh conditions in the English Channel.

The one-design Volvo Ocean racer will be watched with interest. The concept of the boat is to get campaign costs down, by dispensing with design teams, and using a network of four builders based in Europe. Additionally the boat has been designed to last two races, further reducing costs for teams.

However we will have more to tell you, next week, as we will be in Alicante, just 100km from our Sail-World Europe office, on Friday talking to the Volvo Ocean Race organisers.

In this edition of Sail-World.com’s newsletter we have the spectacular images and coverage of the capsize of the MOD70 trimaran Virbac-Paprec sailed by Jean-Pierre Dick and Roland Jourdain while on a training sail of the French coast ahead of the Transat Jacques Vabre race – a two handed trans Atlantic race from the French port of Le Havre to Itajai in Brazil, which was also a stopover on Leg 5 of the 2011/12 Volvo Ocean race, after the fleet left Auckland.

Also featured is the video from inside the cabin, taken by a French journalist who was filming at the time of the incident. Virbac-Paprec was being filmed by a helicopter at the time of the incident – providing some still but a full video of the capsize.

Suffice to say the rig was badly damaged as she inverted.

Stay tuned to Sail-World.com website for all the latest news.

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