Blog
Olympics: 3 months to go...!
Wednesday, 28th April 2021It’s nearly here. After an unprecedented five years of waiting, the Olympics are BACK in just under three months. We can't wait!
International borders aren’t yet open (more on that next week, hopefully), but that doesn’t mean that there’s a lot of sailing to look forwards to this summer. Greece and Croatia (amongst others) will undoubtedly be welcoming tourists soon, but there’s also the small matter of the Olympic Sailing events in July to get excited about.
That means live sailing on the TV, and sailors becoming celebrities for a few short months, when the whole country gets behind them. They might even make the front or back pages of the newspapers!
Tokyo 2020 (but not Tokyo or 2020)
As well as the change of year, there’s also going to be no foreign fans at the Tokyo games. In theory, that should give the Japanese athletes a bit of a boost, but it’s not like the Olympic sailors really notice the spectators when they are out on the water, so that hopefully shouldn’t affect the chances of Team GB in the sailing events.
How does it work?
Each category does a series of around ten qualifying races, where the boats score one point for finishing first, two for second, three for third, and so on. Only the leading ten boats (the ten boats with the lowest aggregate score after all those races) are then entered into the ‘Medal race’, where the points are doubled (so two points for winning, four for second). The points for the medal race are added to the rest, and the person with the fewest points will be taking home the Gold medal!
When does it start?
Who normally wins?
We absolutely love the Olympics, so we’re hoping to bring more Olympic news, views and opinion to you as we get closer to the Olympics. The Olympics are also an obvious next step for our leisure yacht and catamaran charter customers – we’re hoping that one day, someone who’s first experience of sailing was on a boat booked through PlainSailing.com goes on to win an Olympic event!
Images ©Sailing Energy / World Sailing (Via the RYA Media centre) and ©Ian Dempsey / RYA