Looking beyond Weymouth

Published today on www.crew.org.nz

There is no doubt that the next Olympic Regatta will be a brilliant success.

Firstly, the Brits (make that the English!) are the top Olympic sailors, perhaps even top Sailing Nation period.

Secondly, the Weymouth sailing venue is in place and, from all accounts, a magnificent facility.

Thirdly, it's a reasonable bet that, for a change, the weather will cooperate.

Beyond Weymouth, looking towards Rio, it's probably a little early to tell. Sailing is a fearfully elite sport (and I mean elite in a social, rather than competitive sense) in that part of the world and, while there are copious wonderful venues, it's hard to predict how it might play out.

The question remains, however, why International Sailing should continue to bother with the Olympics. Certainly it provides the very highest level of competition, but only within a narrow range of classes.

It can by no means be regarded as the exclusive single pinnacle of our sport.

Many classes enjoy Olympic standard competition without all the disadvantages and bullshit which the Olympics imply. Some, such as the International 505s, resisted overtures because they could not see Olympic participation doing anything for their development. To the contrary, it would decimate their corinthian fleets.

Many sports, too, have resisted Olympic involvement - God only knows why golf has succumbed but it is a fair bet that it's more to do with money than the good of the sport. Does anyone really think that Olympic Golf will become the single biggest golfing event?

Now to the big one. I know I've said it before but sailing (unlike golf or rugby 7s) is a bad fit for the Olympic Games.

It is, venue-wise and logisticly, an expensive sport to mount and, in so far as it has virtually no television appeal, it cannot generate the millions in advertising revenue upon which the Five Ringed Circus feeds. The upshot has been continued pressure from the IOC (even with a yachtsman as president) to cut back the scope of olympic sailing.

New Zealand has an illustrious olympic sailing history and I have the utmost respect for our olympic heroes - I know some of them are distressed with my point of view (one eminent olympian, former colleague and friend, won't even answer my emails!).

But it's a point of view which can be heard right across International Sailing. There is recognition, even at the highest levels of the ISAF sailing, of the sorts of problems I've discussed.

We've got time on our side - but we should be starting to look beyond Weymouth and Rio.

The Great Sweater Sweatshop Caper

More from the Five Ringed Circus

Now I know that the Winter Olympics have nothing whatsoever to do with Sailing, but the onset of the Winter Olympics mean that Summer Olympics are just around the corner, and it's very important and salutary to learn (if you haven't already) what complete ocean going shits many of those associated with the Olympic Games can be. Not all of them of course, but the Olympic Games have a habit of spawning greed and venality and many in and around the movement have come to regard the games as their very own rich cash cow.

The Bay is the former Hudson Bay Company whose fur trading, from the late 17th Century, opened up of much of this vast country. The company, now American owned, is still a major retailer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson

The Cowichan are a nation of First Peoples who populate a corner of Vancouver Island. Nation means whanau, and First Peoples are what in our politically incorrect past we might have called Red Indians. The Cowichans' ancestors would have traded, fed, sheltered, and done other things which I won't mention, with earliest Hudson Bay fur traders.

The First Nations taught the settlers how to survive in the frozen wastes, and the Europeans repaid their kindness by introducing such skills as weaving and knitting. You would imagine that, with the passing of 300 or so years, a certain amount of goodwill and trust might have been established.

Today, the Nation are justly famous for a great Canadian icon - the boldly patterned knitted natural wool sweaters which are prized by tourists, a staple of First Nation handiwork, and provide much of the Cowichans' income. I think they are rather expensive and not quite to my taste but clearly there are other views.

So it is unsurprising that, when the The Bay - official clothing suppliers for the Olympic Games - started to design the Official Olympic Collection their attention was drawn to the famous Cowichan sweater. Nothing could be more Canadian or more suitable to wear while watching the Giant Slalom?

The Bay sent it's team of designers and negotiators to visit the Cowichan, and to learn all there was to learn about knitting the sweaters - the wool, the patterns and designs, the stitching, and all the little tricks and secrets that only knitters know about.

Then what did The Bay do? You guessed it - they took all this intellectual property to China and gave the contract for a gazillion sweaters to the the lowest bidder, the proverbial and euphemistic Great China Sweater Sweatshop Corporation.

The Cowichan saw red. "You're ripping us off us", they said. "No we're not" said The Bay "We're not selling Cowichan Sweaters, they're Cowichan-type sweaters".

Now British Columbians are like Kiwis - they can spot an arsehole, or a rort, at a thousand paces. Such was the public outrage that The Bay and their minders, VANOC -The Vancouver Olympic Committee - seeing themselves on a public relations hiding to hell, thought better of their perfidy and invited the Cowichan to talk.

As Yahoo.sports.com reported:-

Hwitsum (the boss knitter) said the deal will likely see Cowichan sweaters sold in the Hudson's Bay Company's Olympic superstore in downtown Vancouver and in an aboriginal pavilion set up during the Games.

What it would involve is introducing an authentic Cowichan sweater into the Olympic experience," Hwitsum said in an interview.

She said the company had suggested Cowichan knitters incorporate the design used on the official Olympic apparel, but the knitters want to use their own traditional patterns. They are, however, open to the idea of incorporating the Olympics into their sweaters.

I'm too polite to suggest any Olympic images they might wish to incorporate in the relatively few sweaters the Cowichan will sell.

Face may have been restored to the Cowichan nation and the company nimbly averted the worst of a public relations disaster but, in reality, it's taken time to reach this compromise and knitting time is running out. And the customers will be too distracted to consider the relative merits of the genuine article or it's cheap Chinese rip off.

The five ringed circus - here we go again.

First published on www.crew.org forum January 14th, 2009

It beats me why anyone would want a bar of the Olympic Games but the fact is that over the years cities have fought each other tooth and claw, and invested millions in wooing, smooching, and sometimes bribing the Olympic Committee for the right to hold the games.

Almost always they’ve ended up losing their’s or, more to the point, their citizens’ and sponsoring states’ shirts.

No case is more salutary than that of the City of Montreal who paid the last instalment on their now legendary stadium, The Big O, and other costs of their 1976 Olympic Games, in 2006.
The C$150M stadium had grown into a $900M stadium in the intervening 30 years, had partially burned down, and successive roofs had collapsed under the weight of snow and tempest.

Canadian Broadcasting has a good take on the stadium here:- http://archives.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/topics/1316-7926/

Montreal’s other architectural icon, the revolutionary Habitat games village had, in the same period, been declared decidedly un-habitat-able.

More to the point, had Montreal not had this dreadful Olympic monkey around its civic neck, this splendid city might have avoided much of its now very evident infrastructural dereliction and decay.

So, as all eyes turn towards the next Olympic event - Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Games - is it any surprise to learn that the troublemaking Olympic pixies are up to their old tricks?

A couple of years ago the Vancouver City Council sold a valuable piece of harbourside real estate to Millennium Development Corp (you’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the sound of that name!) who in turn contracted to build a $750m games village.

The idea was that when the Olympic flame fluttered to glorious extinction the condominiumised units would be quickly sold, at vast profit, to an impatient and salivating market.
Ha!

It soon became clear that Millennium, who had borrowed $750m from a New York hedge fund called Fortress Investment Group (more raised eyebrows?), were in the sh*t. Costs were escalating (Hello!) and Fortress was withholding progress payments until the city guaranteed the whole shebang.

It gets very complicated here, not least because the city councillors then decided to advance $100M to the project, forgetting to tell anyone that they were spending their citizens’ hard earned moolah.

As we speak, the project is approaching the $1B mark with some hope still being held that it will be ready to host the winter athletes in January.

What is certain is that (given the recessionary times we live in) the good burghers of Vancouver have been landed with the real estate f*ck-up of the century.

Make that millennium.

Getting a grip

First posted on www.crew.org forum October 21st, 2008

So much of what one reads these days points to a lowering of standards, poor supervision, and shoddy execution. Take the education system, for example, where excellence and scholarship seem to have been replaced with a sort of 'she’ll be right- anything goes ' mediocrity.

A glance around at the scruffy and scrofulous hooded apparitions passing for modern youth tells one that simple life skills such as deportment, manners, and attention to personal grooming, have pretty much gone out the back door.

So it was interesting to log on to http://www.stuff.co.nz/ which I make my first call of the day. There I learned, courtesy of The Nelson Mail, that employees of New Zealand Care, the state organisation responsible for the least fortunate of society, are teaching their charges the proper way to masturbate.

Nothing could be more important. There used to be schools, I understand, which taught this most essential of life skills but, sadly, mine wasn’t one of them. Well, not as part of the main curriculum. I suspect that some of the more promising students received private tuition, but I missed out - it could have been the red hair and freckles.

In fact, I must confess that I fumbled around in the most appalling fashion until taught the proper way to do it by a charming young lady in London’s SoHo, in 1963.

So for old jokers like me who grumble about falling standards, it is a pleasant relief to note that there are people amongst us who have the matter in hand.

Olympic Monopoly - lose all your money and go to prison.

First published www.crew.org forum - 18 January 2009

January 18th, 2009

Like every good plot, the Vancouver Games Village fiasco is thickening nicely.

One might imagine that the Council would allow the defaulting developer, Millenium, and its usurious financiers to go to the wall, sue the sods for whatever losses the city has suffered, appoint a new contractor, and press on with the project.

But no. The council is choosing to bail out Millenium, and trying to raise additional funding to not only finish the project but repay the hedge fund loans. It’s Fanny Mae, AIG, and Citibank all over again!

The reason, it turns out, is that 250 of the studio apartments have been pre-sold at prices which, although well below the anticipated final per unit cost (C$1m plus), are nevertheless, significantly higher than could be obtained in the current recession-spooked market. Were the developer allowed to default, these sales would become null and void.

Of course it’s a lose-lose deal for the poor bloody Vancouver taxpayer.

OK. So what, you may well ask, has all this got to do with sailing? Not much actually except, of course, that there is a pattern to all this Olympic nonsense. This is yet another example of overly ambitious city fathers being tricked into penury by the venal ambitions of the IOC.

Like the America’s Cup, the Olympics are a great sponge which soaks up money and resources - but the difference is that this is not the discretionary play-money spending of zillioniares, but the precious resources of people like you and me.

Hands-up anyone who had warm and fuzzy feelings about Olympic President Jacques Rogge persuading the pesky Chinese to lighten up on human rights and freedom of speech? http://crew.net.nz/forum/blog.php?p=49

So much has happened since August that one might be forgiven for forgetting, for example, the ”special protest zones” set aside (at Rogge’s behest) for the good folk of Beijing to stage their protests.

Well today’s New York Times reports that this was all a cunning trick.

Not one permit was issued and the poor sods who naively applied were instead arrested. Mr Ji Suzam 58, a native of Fujian province, who applied to protest at the Purple Bamboo Park, one of three designated areas, was instead given three years in the slammer.

Two old ducks in their 70s , pissed off about paltry compensation for land taken for the games, and who similarly applied, had been earlier sentenced to “re-education through labour”.

Nice work Jacques.

Ladies Golf takes the Cake

First published on Crew.org forum 28 August 2008

So long as the dreadful President Emeritus Juan Antonio Samaranch continues to tread it’s corridors, the Olympic movement can be expected to serve up such Leni Reisenthal-ish images as the jack-booted Chinese guards folding the Olympic flag.

But while, in my experience, there has always been a propensity for sporting officials to emulate the habits and behaviour of the late lamented Fuhrer, the latest move by the Ladies Professional Golf Association takes the cake.

While it purports to be an International body, with part of it’s circuit played in Mexico, Japan, and South Africa, the LPGA is essentially a US institution.

But that hardly justifies the recent xenophobic edict from the storm-troopers of the Ladies Committee - that all players must pass an English language test by 2009 and, meanwhile, newcomers need not apply until they can ‘’spikka da inglees’.

The reason given is that players need to effectively tout their sponsors’ products - say stuff like “I owe my hole in one to Pepto-bismol” or, perhaps, “I couldn’t play 18 holes without my Depends!”
Leaving aside the obvious thought that few Americans could pass an English Test anyway, it will be interesting to see the reaction from the European Ladies. As a temporary resident of bilingual Canada, methinks the LPGA is heading for strife and ridicule.

And how long, I wonder, before yachting’s Cat 1 demands, in the interest of effective communication, that “All crew members will be required to pass an English proficiency Test”?