News ENTRY ALLOCATION FOR THE NORTH AMERICANS

ENTRY ALLOCATION FOR THE NORTH AMERICANS

The Conditions for the IODA North American Championships state that the allocation of entries to each member will be decided at the AGM.

As stated in the Conditions for the majority of the IODA Continental Championships, each IODA member willing to enter sailors to their corresponding Continental event is allowed to enter a specific number of sailors. For example, each Asian member willing to be represented at the IODA Asian Championship is allowed to enter 7 sailors; each South American member have permission to enter 15 sailors to the IODA South Americans (SAMs), and so on. However, this allocation 'by default' does not apply in the same way to the North and South American (NAM and SAM) members attending the IODA North American Championships (NAMs).

The number of entries allocated to each NAM and SAM member varies from year to year, and can only be announced after the Annual General Meeting taking place in the year prior to the year of the relevant event. The reason for this is the growing number of members from the region willing to send sailors to the regatta. In the beginning, when the NAMs were first organised, there were just a few countries entering and each of them had a fixed number of sailors (similar to the present allocation to the other continentals) but an increasing number of fleets demanded that a re-distribution of spots be done.

As a consequence, the Conditions for the IODA NAMs were worded following these needs and Condition 7.1 now states:

• a. Each American (North or South) member of IODA may enter a team of 4 sailors.
• b. The number of additional American (North or South) sailors, with any gender requirement if greater than that specified in the Conditions for IODA Continental Championships 9.2, shall be decided by the North American members at the Annual Meeting of IODA. If places so allocated are not taken up by the first payment deadline, additional entries for American members that have requested them may be allocated by the IODA Executive Committee.
• c. The number of entries from non-American members shall be determined by the IODA Executive not less than one year before the event.

What have been done in the past -and is the procedure that the IODA Executive Committee recommends because it is fair and convenient (it automatically gives more places for growing fleets)- was to calculate the entries based on the average participation of each NAM and SAM member in the NAMs and Worlds of the previous two years. As one of the goals of IODA is to promote the participation of as many sailors as possible, the calculations also took into account the number of 'different sailors' entering both events, favouring the members with more total sailors participating.

What does 'different sailors' mean?

This is better explained with an example: let's think of a member that send a team of 5 sailors to the Worlds and another team of 15 sailors to the same year's NAMs. If the sailors attending the Worlds are or were part of the team participating in the NAMs, then the member have a total of 15 different sailors attending both events. If only 4 of the sailors attending the Worlds were part of the team going to the NAMs, the member have 16 different sailors between both events. If none of the sailors that go to the Worlds are or were part of the team going to the NAMs, then the member have 20 different sailors in total.

The average participation of all the members (plus spare spots to allow for a potential participation of countries that do not ussually attend the event) are added and the total is compared to the maximum number of sailors established for the relevant year in the Notice of Race. The allocation is then calculated proportionally to match the mentioned maximum.

The entry allocation for the NAMs in 2011 will be announced after the AGM in Malaysia, once the North American representatives have agreed on the calculations and final numbers, and will be published in the Notice of Race afterwards.