Every four years, the sport’s most important competition takes place, the prestigious Olympic Games. This year, in Marseille for the Paris 2024 Olympics, the ILCA will, once more, be the biggest and most represented, with 86 athletes from 56 nations split between the male and female events.
As a strict one-design class, the ILCA dinghy has the advantage of bringing the ‘athlete vs. athlete’ nature of Olympic competition to a higher standard by providing identical, purposefully built equipment.
For our elite athletes competing in Marseille, the equipment randomly assigned to them will look and feel like any other ILCA they have ever sailed. Yet, behind the scenes, ILCA and its network of builders have done a huge amount of work to push standards higher.
Back in June 2022, the ILCA Technical Team initiated the ‘2024 Olympic Equipment Supply’ project. A detailed process and policy, in close coordination with World Sailing (WS) and the Paris 2024 regulations, was put in place and approved by the ILCA World Council.
For the 2024 Olympics, ILCA had more potential suppliers than ever before, with nine highly qualified and reputable builders to select from. Comprised of internal and external members, ILCA put together a selection panel to review, assess, and select three builders for the supply of the Olympic Equipment—referred to as the ‘shortlisted builders’.
The selection was based on 16 individual criteria under four main topics: consistency, durability, quality, and sustainability. It is paramount to ILCA that all boats racing in the Olympics are as identical as possible within the world of composite manufacturing while ensuring that the whole production process is verifiable through data. Therefore, quality control, repeatability, manufacturing process, and consistency were among the key factors that the panel considered.
As ILCA has two separate events at the Olympic Games (Men’s and Women’s One-person Dinghy), it was decided to have a separate builder for each fleet. Yet, to ensure the objectives were met in full, and as a contingency, three builders were shortlisted to produce potential Olympic fleets of 50 boats each, with two to be selected for the Olympics.
The selection panel reviewed thousands of data points gathered during the past years of operation of the builders in the form of audit data, PPMP (Post Production Monitoring Program)/field data, and audit reports in order to select the builders that best aligned with the objectives.
In preparation for production, each builder was given a strict set of tolerances for all the equipment that pushed the standards of consistency, equality, and quality control of equipment to new levels.
ILCA Technical Officers visited the factories of all three shortlisted builders during the Olympic production run to ensure all requirements were fully met. Weekly calls were held to monitor progress and manage delays and issues that arose during the last six months of production and delivery.
With several geopolitical events occurring in the last 6 to 12 months, the logistic timelines of shipping containers around Europe and the World had to adapt. Still, all equipment arrived on schedule. This allowed ILCA and World Sailing to jointly review, cross-check, measure, and validate the production and quality control data provided for the three fleets.
With all the equipment now produced, delivered, and verified, ILCA is ready to welcome the sailors into Marseille for the 2024 Olympics with the confidence that individual athlete ability will be the definite deciding factor in the competition, as is the spirit and legacy of our class.