Road to Tokyo 2020 - Irish Olympic News

Does that mean another team complained ?

Surely if so they are only guessing going on sight

It must have been found at a check by officials so it looks very ominous.

A protest is a hearing held if a competitor or the race committee feels a rule was broken. The race committee are only the umpires that oversee the race, they make sure the course is set correctly and run the start sequences etc. The really can only disqualify competitors indirectly if they break a rule during the racing that merits it, an example would be if theres been multiple bad starts by the fleet where boats are over the line and they need to do a full restart the committee can institute whats called a black flag rule where any boat that is over the line on the next start will be immediately disqualified. In this case its not a rule broken during the race but an overall class rule so the comittee cannot take direct action and need to do it via a protest.

Fair enough. It just confused me at first because a protest is usually launched by other teams in sports I watch so it got lost in translation.

I know they have a black flag in F1 too but when you say it in sailing terms it sounds fun and piratey

It's great fun to watch sailing fleets push the starting line under normal starting rules, but as posted above if there's too many over the line at the gun, the U or black flag get broken out (which means if you're over the starting line in the one minute before the gun you're disqualified).

It fairly puts manners on everyone 🤣

Yeah, "protest" is a particular term in sailing - they're usually initiated by another boat(s) due to something that happens out in the race course, but in this case where strict weights and measurement are enforced, there's a jury or committee who can also protest a boat or crew if they find an infringement.

So it looks like someone protested. That is very weird and you'd have to assume that they were sure of their ground before making the protest. How you can tell that the equipment is out of specification and overweight is another question as it would surely not be easily accessible to anyone bar the Irish crew themselves.

As mentioned above their gear gets measured and weighed after every session, for some reason one of the harnesses came in overweight so the Race Committee have this confirmed overweight measurement to form their protest on.

The idea that someone could sneak a weight into someones harness makes no sense as the person wearing it would very likely notice it and i don't believe the lads would honestly do it either.

Heres Prof explaining it pretty well for anyone not understanding why the harness weight is such a big issue

Damn they've been disqualified from races 5 and 6 along with the Brazilian boat for the same reason who had an even heavier harness, im not sure if they can appeal. Below is the pdf of the protest hearing

https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/olympic-games/resOG2020-/pdf/OG2020-/SAL/OG2020-_SAL_C68E_SAL-------------------------------29.pdf

Fook 😡

You wonder how that can happen? If it is intentional it doesn't seem like an edge you could get away with given the weighing so that seems unlikely. If it has been used before how did it pass before? Was there drainage issues, were they simply going too close to line and it got a little more water weight for one weighing? Can the absorbensy of it change over time? It mentions they are weighed a few times and the lowest taken. I wonder how much it varies in those cases and between different races. Also the Brazilians seem to be a mile over the limit. Surely it can't vary that much or they would have more issues? Potentially someone made an error and didn't soak it enough when we checked the harness ( I am presuming we check our equipment to make sure it will pass)?

I am curious as to why they don't just measure it before races and everyone can be confident in their gear.

I feel like those questions sound like I am asking leading questions but I haven't a clue about them and it is pretty confusing.

I'm assuming you can't do the checks before because the sailors and mechanics want to do last minute checks where as afterwards you can just impound all the boats and take your time with them with no interference.

I think most vehicle sports do post race checks

There is a possibility that that maybe Ireland were actually cheating. Everyone seems to be going down the oversight route

90 grams is 90ml of water in equivalence, literally a tiny amount, seems harsh and is certainly not intentional cheating.