Para Sailing Must Remain a Priority

The World Sailing Annual Conference, the biggest gathering of the world governing body for the sport of sailing, comes to the USA in 2018 to hold its meetings on October 27 to November 4 in Sarasota, Florida.

In advance of the 2018 meeting, Scuttlebutt editor Craig Leweck spoke with World Sailing President Kim Andersen on a number of topics to be discussed in Sarasota. Here’s Part 3 of this five part series:

After Sailing was removed from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, there was a lot of optimism for it to return at the 2024 Games. How big a surprise was it when the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) said no again?

I was deeply surprised because we have been working so hard on this issue. We were in close contact with the IPC to fully understand their requirements, not just so we could hit them but rather exceed them. And in our opinion, we have exceeded them on all issues.

Following the IPC announcement, we’re looking at their evaluation, and while it’s not for public viewing, I’d say that at least on 60% of their validations, in my opinion, they are wrong. We are currently working the IPC to give us the feedback on each of these points of how they’re getting to their evaluation compared to our evaluation. We are still waiting for this information from them.

The good news was to see the growth that had occurred since 2016, which was not easy when you are a non-Olympic discipline as then the national funding from many countries was not there. So while it does not look good for now, we cannot lose this momentum. We need to continue one way or the other, Olympic or not, to make para sailing a priority in our sport.