Olympics: Going for Gold

For more multihull reviews and stories, subscribe for free to Multihull Power & Sail at sailmagazine.com/multihull

The Paris 2024 Olympics are right around the corner, and though favorites like gymnastics, diving, and swimming promise to be the most viewed highlights, don’t forget to check out the sailing as well. Over 300 competitors in 10 classes will race for gold, including one fleet aboard small cats called NACRA 17s. Here’s everything you need to know about their road to the Olympics.

Sailing’s been on the summer games’ schedule since the beginning—in fact, a sailor named Hélène de Pourtalès became the first woman to ever win an Olympic gold medal back in 1900. But it wasn’t until 1976 that a catamaran class was added to the event for the first time in the form of a sporty, 20-foot-long, doublehanded boat called a Tornado. The Tornado class got a few upgrades along the way and remained the Olympic cat class for more than 30 years through 2008. In 2012 there were no cats, but in 2016, the Morrelli & Melvin-designed NACRA 17 reintroduced cats to the fleet. Still in use today, the boat is 17 feet long and sailed with a mixed-gender crew of two. Oh, and it foils. For the 2020 Toyko games the class was converted to fly.

Not every country is represented on the Olympic starting line, which will be in Marseille, France, in 2024. Instead, a number of lead-up events give teams opportunities to qualify their country. As of press time, an American team hadn’t yet qualified in the NACRA 17 (women’s ILC6, 49erFX, and Formula Kite sailors, and men’s 49er sailors have qualified). Still, there remain opportunities to secure a spot, including the Pan American Games in late October.

For Olympic hopefuls, qualifying their country doesn’t guarantee a trip to France, though—it’s just step one. After someone from the country qualifies, another intranational selection process in April and May decides which pair of sailors will actually represent the country in the Olympics.

Two of the sailors hoping to make it to the start line next year are skipper Carson Crain and crew Lindsay Gimple. Crain has been sailing in the class since the summer of 2020, but Gimple only joined the campaign in April of 2023 and says the learning curve has been steep. “A lot of that is just because it’s a foiling boat,” she says. “My background is offshore and before that college sailing, so getting back into a smaller boat is different.”

And it’s not just the size of the boat that makes it a challenge. “Like any traditional catamaran, our tacking angles are pretty wide,” Crain concedes. “But when compared to [a similarly sized displacement monohull], we’re going to go three times their speed. And I think the toughest thing about this boat is just the three dimensional aspect of being up on the foil, trying to balance the boat on the foil.”

“You use your weight to do that, which is what we’ve been working on a lot,” Gimple adds. “When I was first training, we were in Miami where the water is a lot flatter, and that was really helpful because in bigger conditions, you have to be moving so much and be so much more in sync with the boat than when it’s flat. I have to be on my toes and active about where I am.”

And though body weight plays a big part in controlling the boat—it’s just 381 pounds and optimally sailed by a crew of 310 pounds—understanding specifically how it all works is also key. “If we’re trying to foil upwind, we need to add max positive lift on our leeward rudder and max negative lift on our windward rudder. And then we also have lift on our main foils. And just because you add lift doesn’t mean the boat is going to fly,” Crain says. 

Knowledge of the technology and physics behind these boats is crucial to sailing them at the competitive level. 

“It’s also a big job for Lindsay to make sure that she gets the sail set up right so that the boat has the right amount of power to generate enough speed so that the foils are actually effective. And that’s something you might not notice. You’ll never be able to see that from the outside.”

And if that all doesn’t sound complicated enough, it gets even harder in a sea state, which has been a bigger part of training since they transitioned to European venues over the summer.

“We’re trying to be in Europe as much as we can because that’s where all the competitions are. And it’s also where all the people we can learn from are,” says Crain. “There’s not much here in the United States.”

While more sailing-dominant countries tend to have robust training programs to help their athletes prepare, American sailors don’t benefit from that kind of built-in infrastructure. In addition to elite level training, the sailors must manage all of their own fundraising and logistics. And because the competition isn’t local, Crain and Gimple will spend much of the year leading up to the selection training overseas and managing their campaign from on the road.

They also have tough competition in the form of Americans Sarah Newberry Moore and David Liebenberg, who have been competing in the NACRA 17 together since 2018 and are likely to be the favorites for securing the country qualification. Still, Gimple and Crain are putting in the sweat equity to be ready to take them on when team selection comes around.

And though Olympic experience comes with a huge amount of work and cost, it can also be a springboard for a career, with Olympic sailors having gone on to elite professional teams like SailGP, the America’s Cup, and The Ocean Race. 

For more multihull reviews and stories, subscribe for free to Multihull Power & Sail at sailmagazine.com/multihull

Multihull Power & Sail 2024