Sailing: Forming an Irish Admiral's Cup team - the first in over a decade - will be top of the agenda tomorrow morning in Kilkenny when the second annual Irish Cruiser racer conference hears details of a €500,000 bid to win the world championship of offshore racing for Ireland next July.
The three-boat challenge, spearheaded by 26-year-old David Nixon from Howth, the skipper of June's Round Ireland entrant 02 Team Spirit, a chartered Volvo 60-footer, will be discussed at the conference ahead of the publication of the cup's official notice of race by the Royal Ocean Racing Club next week.
Nixon aims to form the Irish team from a core of both professional and amateur crews, the first since 1993, and begin training for the 40 members of the pro-am squad before Christmas.
The three AC-type boats that Nixon must now find - and finance - to mount a successful challenge are the Mumm 30, to be skippered by Athens Olympic dinghy helmsman Tom Fitzpatrick; a Swan 45, to be skippered by Nixon, and the large IRC-rated Transpac 52, which is under construction by Eamonn Conneelly of Galway.
Tomorrow's conference will also discuss next year's national championships as part of Kinsale's Sovereign's week, and will reveal news of the yacht of the year award, a contest that now looks certain to go one of three ways between Anthony O'Leary's Antix, Colm Barrington's Flying Glove or Eamonn Crosbie's Voodoo Chile.
Staying with cruiser-racing, major changes to the established format of the Scottish series have been introduced to promote closer racing.
After consultation with many of the participants, the overnight and day-time feeder races from Gourock in Scotland and Bangor in Northern Ireland have been abandoned to make way for four full days of round the buoys racing, with multiple daily races.
The series will now conclude with a full day of racing on Britain's May Bank Holiday Monday.
Abroad, Ireland's Ken Ryan, the International Sailing Federations' vice-president, has been honoured with a gold medal by the world body for his services to sailing at the recent ISAF conference in Copenhagen.
At the same meeting, the ISAF council voted by a 2:1 majority in favour of replacing the Europe dinghy with the Laser Radial as the women's single-handed disciple for the Beijing Olympics, a dinghy that is more popular in this country than the Europe dinghy, an Olympic class since Atlanta, has ever been.
At home, and in its first meeting since Athens, the Irish Sailing Association Olympic Group met this week to review the interim report into what went wrong at the Games and to appoint a new chairman following the decision by Royal Cork's Anthony O'Leary to step down after serving the last four years since Sydney.
Officials are scratching their heads to examine why they are facing such diminishing returns on an eight-year investment since Atlanta.
That the sailing team did worse as a team in Athens than in Sydney, and that it did worse in Sydney than it did in Atlanta, underlines the need for a change of plan despite significant extra Government funding coming sailing's way.
An interim report has been prepared post-Athens by Wharton Consulting, the same firm that is carrying out the Irish Sports Council's Olympic evaluation report into the Athens enhancement programme.
Team manager Garrett Connolly has promised to publish details of the final report, but until then the Irish Sailing Association remains tight-lipped about its content.
