Rio 2016 kicking off! Olympics and Medal Races: how to follow them (and get excited)

Racing starts today in Rio 2016! The Italian athletes competing we have presented them to you in detail (complete with our medal prediction), now we explain how to follow the races!

THE ALLURE OF OLYMPIC SAILING
How lucky I was. The first time I watched an Olympic Medal Race live, in London 2012, it was a race that has entered the annals of sailing. The one that crowned Sir Ben Ainslie God of Sailing., with the fourth gold won, the third consecutive in the Finn class. An incredible show of strength by the baronet, helped by a bit of luck in the finale when Dutchman PJ Postma, who was feeling gold around his neck, ran into a penalty that caused him to slip to fourth in the last hundred meters. I remember almost crying for him, rejoicing at the same time for Ainslie, who had managed to control Denmark’s Jonas Høgh-Christensen, the leader before the Medal, relegating him to second place. This initial “gunslinging” serves to make you understand the emotions that only a Medal Race can give you: you prepare four years, you sweat tears and blood, then in one race everything can be decided, undoing what good or not so good you have done during the previous races.

HOW TO WATCH THE MEDAL RACES LIVE
Therefore, whether you are on a cruise or on your couch at home, I cannot help but advise you to see what will happen in the final challenges of Rio 2016. The entire schedule of Olympic classes in Brazil can be found in the red box on the opposite page. As for live streaming of the Medal Races, the classes can be followed on Rai’s website(www.rai.tv), or on the official Olympics Youtube channel(https://www.youtube.com/user/olympic).

HERE ARE ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR FOLLOWING OLYMPIC SAILING ALONGSIDE RAI

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THE BEST SAILING INSTRUCTORS IN THE WORLD
It is not just a matter of emotion. Watching an Olympic Medal Race you learn so much, in terms of tactics and racing strategy, from the best sailing masters in the world: the Olympic drifters. It’s one thing to see them aboard the speedy America’s Cup hulls, or braving the oceans at the Volvo Ocean Race: as a crew, their prowess is “amalgamated” into the collective. But in an Olympic final you can get inside the head of a champion, understand his choices in function of what others are doing. This is Sailing, with a capital “V”: all against all, equal boats. The one who makes the fewest mistakes and who puts forth the most coolness wins. In the foot below we reveal some of the Rio 2016 players vying for a medal and from whom you can learn more.

HOW MEDAL RACES WORK
How does the final medal regatta work? First of all, it should be mentioned that in the “qualifying” phase, depending on the classes, 10 to 15 fleet races are held: a discard is allowed so that by adding up the results of the 9 or 14 races, the ten best athletes/crew enter the Medal Race. The rankings that have gone so far obviously do not reset, but in the Medal, a dry run, the scoring is double. The first gets two points, the second four, and so on until the tenth gets twenty points-especially if you get to the Medal with a short ranking, anything can happen. The score obtained in the Medal Race is not discardable from the overall score.

WHAT A RESPONSIBILITY THE UMPIRES!
First introduced at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this type of formula involves at-sea refereeing: judges are called umpires, following the race closely in dinghies (the rules require at least one dinghy for every three boats). The umpires, in case of infractions of the Race Rules, assign penalties to the competitors: the penalized boat must perform a 360°, that is, a turn around itself before it can return to the race. In competitions of this level, losing a few seconds, since the fleets are “very short,” means slipping to the bottom of the leaderboard: getting out of the abyss is very difficult so a wrong decision by the judges can affect a sailor’s entire sailing career. Pietro and Gianfranco Sibello know something about this, who in 2008 had their medal snatched from their necks after a perfect Medal Race by the Danish crew of Jonas Warrer and Martin Kirketerp who, having broken their mast in the pre-race, had returned to port and borrowed the Croatian team’s boat.

THE LAW OF ENTERTAINMENT
With a view to “showmanship,” the Medal Races take place on a reduced course compared to the normal trials and positioned closer to the coast, to allow the public to follow them well from land or from the harbor. Boats that will be used in the Medal Race are checked and rechecked by Olympic stewards and are left in a kind of “quarantine” for 24 hours in a yard before the decisive race.

Eugene Ruocco

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