Yachts & Yachting’s Deputy Editor, Toby Heppell, believes World Sailing have made the right decision to introduce an offshore keelboat event for the Paris Olympics in 2024.

The Finn has been a part of sailing at the Olympic Games since 1952 and – following the removal of the Star from the roster after 2012 – is the oldest serving Olympic class for the sport.

The boat is highly technical to race and tune and, thanks to the option to select different hull designs, masts with different bend characteristics, and cuts of sail, a relatively wide band of weights can be competitive – even if a competitive weight remains on the heavy side of the global average for a healthy male.

I have sailed a Finn a couple of times and, though I am woefully light and short to be anything like competitive, it was an excellent boat to sail.

At the class’ World Championships – the Finn Gold Cup – they get huge numbers of sailors competing and many other events too. The class is clearly popular with sailors the world over, offers competitive racing, has a well-stocked second hand market and is challenge to sail well.

All in all, it would seem an ideal Olympic option, so you can understand the outrage that the class – and many of the class’ supporters in the sailing community – have expressed following the announcement this weekend that the Olympic Games in Paris 2024 will not feature a mixed gender singlehanded dinghy event (the only event for which the Finn could be selected) and instead there will be a mixed gender offshore keelboat event, in a reversal of the decisions made at the World Sailing mid Year Meeting in May 2018.

A statement released by International Finn Association (IFA) President, Balazs Hajdu on Sunday 4 November states that:

The International Finn Association (IFA) is extremely disappointed to see the decision taken today at the World Sailing AGM in Sarasota, USA, to exclude any event options for the Finn in favour of adopting the Mixed Two-Person Keelboat.

Most of all we are very disappointed for the many committed Finn sailors affected by this decision, especially the young sailors who have had their campaign ambitions for 2024 cruelly shattered.

We feel the Finn class has become collateral damage in the quest for gender equality and Olympic TV rights income for World Sailing.

It is a great injustice that many of the best athletes in the sport of sailing no longer have an avenue to the Olympics, and we honestly feel the Olympics will be poorer as a result of the exclusion of the Finn.

We know the Finn class will continue to thrive and for the time being we will focus on supporting our athletes as they prepare for Tokyo 2020. In the coming months, the IFA will work towards finding a way back for the Finn on the Olympic programme.

The reaction is understandable and not unexpected, but unfortunately for all the positives the Finn offers, I would argue that at present there simply is not space for the boat in the Olympic event programme.

In fact, and without wishing to be overly controversial, I would argue that the continued lobbying to maintain the Finn’s spot at the Olympic Games very nearly did the sport as a whole a great deal of damage on the Olympic stage. And I say all of this as someone who genuinely likes the boats (and as a Brit who wants to see my country, long dominant in the class, win as many medals as possible at the Olympics).

As ever with Olympic Event and Class selection there are a great many factors at play and the World Sailing Council / Committee system with submissions being put forward then voted on by Council is a system that makes it very difficult to set a specific direction and all pull the same way – there are simply too many people voting who have a vested interest in some or other aspect of the sport.

Back in May we saw the introduction of a single kitesurfing event. This remains controversial and I quite understand those who say the event should not be a part of sailing at the Olympic Games. I can also quite understand those, like World Sailing President Kim Andersen, who argue that we’ve had this conversation years ago when windsurfing was included and if that is sailing, so is kitesurfing.

These two ideological stances both have their merits but with respect to the removal of the Finn from the Olympics it’s irrelevant. The event for which the Finn was pencilled in was the mixed singlehanded dinghy and it is this event that has been removed and replaced with a two person offshore event.

I personally can think of no major event, race or regatta, which operates as a mixed gender two-person singlehanded event. Since the decision was made to include the event in the 2024 Olympics back in May 2018 at the Mid-Year Meeting, the sailing world has been awash with bemused, and ultimately inconclusive, speculation about exactly how it might work. Would it be two classes on the same course? Will there be some sort of team race element? Would it be two separate regattas with a cumulative score?

Nobody knew the answer to any of these questions, for one key reason. This event was created with the sole purpose of keeping the Finn in the Olympic Games. There was no other reason for its existence and it represents no part of the sport of sailing.

For a number of years now the exclusion of keelboat racing in the Olympics has meant that a significant portion of the sport is entirely unrepresented on the biggest international stage – and you can argue that the Star although technically a keelboat was probably closer to a dinghy for most sailors than it is to a racing keelboat.

Furthermore I struggle to think of a keelboat option that World Sailing could select for an offshore race that would not be able to carry at least as wide a range of sailor as the Finn currently can. Are we honestly saying that Giles Scott, would be at a physical disadvantage to other, lighter sailors on a 30ft two person keelboat?

Surely, larger sailors across the globe should be cheering this decision. All those who bemoaned the removal of the Star from the Olympics on the grounds that there would no longer be a keelboat at the Games should be cheering too.

That is before we consider the benefits potentially on offer for the sport. An event taking place over a number of days instantly and naturally works with any time zone across the world. Audiences could watch the sailing live not matter where they are in the world and where the Olympics are taking place, this has got to be a big plus for the sport.

It could also help bridge the gap to the offshore racing world, where the greats tend to be older than Olympians. It is easy to see a path from Laser or 49er up to Offshore Olympic racing, before moving onto a Solitaire du Figaro campaign – or running the two concurrently – then into round the world racing and so on. That could provide the option to start generating some household names throughout the world in the sport of sailing.

Finally, I believe it is easier for a layman to immediately understand the difference between a marathon event like this and short course singlehanded racing in different boats.

I do wish we could work out a way to fit the Finn into the Olympic programme, for a number of reasons. I don’t think one design racing should be the be all and end all of the sailing world. I was out in Rio for the 2016 Olympic Games and so could witness the Finns out in the big waves and strong winds of the offshore courses and so can report they provided some of the most spectacular racing of the event – even if it was foolishly left un-broadcast as the outer courses where not covered by TV equipment.

I wish the class could stay in some way. But I do not wish that at the expense of the sport in general. When I read the news that World Sailing had overturned that foolish decision from May, I thought the sailing world would be celebrating a win for common sense from a federation that all too often gets it wrong. There is a long way to go and the offshore event is a very long way indeed from a guaranteed success. But I, for one, am excited about the possibility.