By Peter Huston

The ISAF Fleet Ranking system is broken. It rewards cheating. Looking at US Sailing’s current favored sailor, Paige Railey, we see that she gets thrown out of the 2006 Laser Radial World Championship, and yet the points she gets for finishing last in the Gold Fleet because of a regatta disqualification are included in her total ISAF ranking point score, while the “big” regatta she won last year – the Qingdao Test Event does not even garner enough points to be included in her overall current point total. You can read Paige’s current ISAF ranking points here.

But the Qingdao event seems to be the regatta that put her over the top in terms of her winning the ISAF and US Sailing Rolex Awards, because of the perception that it carries as an Olympic test event. Of course, Anna Tunnicliffe beat Paige in the US Sailing pre-trails a few weeks later, and if you can’t win in Newport, you aren’t even going to Qingdao in ’08.

So – we have a regatta that ISAF for ranking purposes doesn’t think all that worthwhile, but for social awards think it is the be-all end-all. Which one is it? Paul Henderson asked a relevant question in his recent Innerview – “How did Paige get nominated for the Rolex awards?"

But this isn’t about Paige v. Anna. This is about every other person in the ranking list that needs to have a finish of a certain predetermined position to qualify for their national team funding. Probably many countries have some sort of team funding formula with part of the equation based on ISAF ranking. What if, as an example, Tatiana Drozdovskaia from the Belarus who is currently 21st on the ISAF Laser Radial ranking list, misses the Belarus funding cut by one if that limit was 20th or better, because Paige gets to keep points she gathered in the ’06 Laser Radial Worlds and where she might drop below Drozdovskaia if she was not able to keep the points “earned” from the ‘06 Radial Worlds. I don’t know if this is the case for the Belarus team or not, it’s just an example.

Why if you are thrown out of an Olympic Class World Championship should ISAF give that sailor any ranking points for that regatta? And better yet, why not make them count only six regattas for the duration of the scoring cycle in which the Rule 42 regatta DSQ occurs, and add a zero point regatta as their seventh scoring regatta as an additional incentive to play within the limits of Rule 42? Get thrown out of two regattas for Rule 42 violations, count two zeros in your ranking points total.

Now what of the concept that some in the US have proposed that Paige was just “testing” the Umpires in the recent Rolex Miami OCR where she was, again, thrown out for getting three Rule 42 violations. How on earth does this fall under the heading of “sportsmanship”? And what if because of the ISAF Grading of that regatta, and the resultant ranking points available, it too becomes a score that helps her stay above others on the ranking list who sailed by the rules? How would this be fair to any other Laser Radial sailor in the world with Olympic aspirations?

The only way that ISAF makes any sort of change to anything is via one of their member national authorities making a “submission”. That means someone in a country needs to get their national authority to make a submission relative to all of this. Given the exchange I’ve recently had with US Sailing President Jim Capron where I asked him several questions about how it is that someone who had been thrown out of a World Championship still wins the US Sailing Rolex award, and his reluctance to respond in writing saying only that a written exchange wouldn’t be productive (“would not be productive for whom?”, I’d ask, if I didn’t already know the answer), it seems unlikely that US Sailing will make a submission to ISAF on this topic as it would serve to hurt the Laser Radial sailor they so obviously favor. So, what small country, where ISAF ranking list position really matters to a sailor, is willing to take this on and make a submission to ISAF?

The system is broken. Let’s fix it, now. Comments?

02/21/07