Olympic Entertainment VS Fairness: Emma Wilson’s Bronze
A traumatic medal race for Emma Wilson at the Olympics underlined the tension between entertainment and a fair result, Andy Rice reports.
If Emma Wilson had won gold at the Olympic Regatta, we wouldn’t still be talking about this. It always seems to need a sacrificial lamb in order for change to happen, or even to be discussed in the first place.
If Emma Wilson had won gold, we would have celebrated her start-to-finish dominance of the women’s windsurfing in mostly windless Marseille, and the world would have moved on without a second thought about the rights and wrongs of the sudden-death format used in iQFOiL competitions.
It’s not like we didn’t see this coming, or at least those nerds like me who cover the Olympic circuit on a regular basis. As Wilson said at the press conference soon after receiving her bronze at the medal ceremony, what’s the point of spending a whole week of racing if the medals are all to be determined in one final six-minute race on the final day?
Sudden-death
Then again, isn’t that how events in the Olympic pool and on the athletics track are decided? It doesn’t matter how fast you run or swim in the quarter or the semi-finals, it’s all about what you do in the final, nothing else. Look at most of the new sports that have been introduced to the summer and winter Games over the past decade, and an awful lot of the medals are decided by some form of sudden-death climax.
For example, eight BMX bikers launching down a track where it’s 35 seconds of all-out furious pedalling, jumping, doing whatever it takes to get across the line ahead of your rivals. A couple will crash out along the way and someone will cross in first and grab a gold that very probably would go to someone else if the race was run again.
So, to some extent, regrettably sailing has to expect to fall into line with the rest of the Olympics and its push towards these final-day climaxes. There is certainly nothing climactic or exciting about the traditional medal race format. OK, so in the men’s and women’s skiff final races we witnessed the rare scenario where seven out of 10 of the men’s teams could still take gold, and five out of the ten women’s teams. If this happened all the time, the medal race would be fine as it is. No reason to change. But the reason for this happy anomaly with the skiff medals races was more to do with the extremely random and fickle conditions of Marseille. None of the usual favourites had managed to stretch their usual points advantage across the regatta. It was a bit of a crapshoot.
What happened in the singlehanded dinghies was much more typical. Matt Wearn had as good as wrapped up the gold for Australia in the men’s ILCA 7, and Marit Bouwmeester had absolutely put the gold to bed before the final women’s race in the ILCA 6. In sailing we praise the dominance of such a performance, and rightly so. But these predictable outcomes are just not exciting enough for the Games. To persist with this predictable and mostly boring format will continue to put the Olympic future of the sport at risk.
The kitefoiling format addresses the weaknesses of both extremes. It gets as close to hitting the sweet spot between rewarding the best athletes whilst holding their feet to the fire in a final-day series that keeps the game open until the very end. It’s not perfect, because for one thing it takes a bit of explaining, but Valentin Bontus’ outstanding performance was a marvel to behold. The Austrian burst his way out of the semi-final round and swept aside the two riders ahead of him who were already in the final, Slovenia’s Toni Vodisek and Singapore’s Max Maeder. It was a shock victory for the ebullient Austrian, but even Vodisek and Maeder conceded they had been beaten by the better man on the day. Bontus’s gold shows what’s possible with alternative formats, and what works for the kites would work equally well for slower, more traditional classes like the ILCAs or the 470.
There are probably still tweaks and further experiments that could be made to the existing kite format. In fact there definitely are. This November’s World Sailing Annual Conference will be the place to discuss any format changes. What I hope won’t happen is what usually happens, when good ideas are voted down in an airless hotel conference room before they’re even given a chance to be tested on the water. What I hope does happen is that various ideas are proposed and then taken forward for testing in major events over the coming four years before the Los Angeles 2028 Games.
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